Celonis Engineer Used mirrord to Cut Dev Environment Overhead for 600 Engineers

Prathyusha Ramanjaneyulu, a Senior Software Engineer at Celonis, was responsible for maintaining development velocity across a team of over 600 engineers building microservices on Kubernetes. Engineers initially ran all dependent services locally, causing severe resource constraints and weeks-long setup times, while a later shared VM approach reduced setup to about a day and a half but introduced 3+ hours of weekly maintenance and shared-environment outages. Ramanjaneyulu and her team evaluated both Telepresence and mirrord as solutions for connecting local development environments to a remote Kubernetes cluster. They ultimately chose mirrord, whose model allows a local process to impersonate a pod inside the cluster rather than joining the cluster network wholesale. The switch aimed to eliminate environment overhead and unblock engineers from spending time on infrastructure problems unrelated to the code they were actually writing.