What happens when you click “order” for an Inter.link network service?
At Inter.link, that single action triggers a fully automated chain of systems — provisioning infrastructure, configuring BGP sessions, and deploying changes across a live backbone in minutes. This is what modern Network-as-a-Service looks like. Automation sits at the core of Inter.link’s platform, powering services such as IP Transit, DDoS Protection, FlexEthernet, and other connectivity solutions designed for speed, reliability, and transparency.
Building automated network services is only part of the challenge. Behind every customer order is a sophisticated software delivery engine that must continuously evolve to keep pace with growth, new products, and rising customer expectations.
In a technical talk, Poh Chiat Koh, Tech Lead CI/CD & Systems at Inter.link, shared a behind-the-scenes look at how the company has transformed its software environment, improved deployment pipelines, and built engineering principles that support rapid innovation at scale.
Why Software Delivery Matters in Networking
Traditional telecom still runs on manual processes — long lead times, ticket-based provisioning, and limited visibility.
Inter.link flips that model completely.
Customers can order services directly through the Inter.link portal, configure requirements such as ports and BGP sessions, and activate connectivity rapidly through software-driven workflows.
That level of customer experience depends on robust internal systems capable of translating customer requests into production-ready network configurations safely and consistently.
In practice, this means software delivery is just as important as network engineering.
From Customer Order to Live Service
When a customer orders a service such as IP Transit, multiple systems work together automatically.
Behind the scenes, a single order triggers a fully automated workflow:
- Customer Portal
Everything starts in the Inter.link customer portal, where users can:
- Select a service
- Choose a location
- Configure connectivity parameters
- Submit an order instantly
- Backend Validation
Once the order is placed, internal APIs validate the request, check technical requirements, and prepare provisioning logic.
- Resource Allocation
Immediately, Inter.link’s platform orchestrates multiple backend systems to:
- Create service records
- Allocate IP resources
- Configure ports
- Prepare BGP sessions
- Update operational systems
- Network Deployment
Once validated, configuration data is pushed through automated deployment pipelines to network devices across the Inter.link backbone.
What appears simple from the customer side is powered by significant orchestration behind the scenes.
Growth Creates Complexity
As Inter.link scaled, its product portfolio and automation platform expanded rapidly — with tens of thousands of lines of code supporting:
Over time, engineering teams added tens of thousands of lines of code to support:
- New products
- Additional customer features
- More advanced provisioning logic
- Monitoring improvements
- Billing integrations
- Enhanced network automation
This growth is expected for a fast-scaling technology company, but with scale comes complexity. More code means more operational complexity.
The challenge becomes clear:
How do you keep shipping improvements quickly without sacrificing reliability?
Early Challenges: Manual Releases and Slow Pipelines
As the Inter.link grew, so did the pressure on the system. Releases slowed. Pipelines became heavier. Coordination increased.
What started as a fast-moving engineering environment risked becoming a bottleneck.
Manual Production Releases
At one stage, production deployments required engineers to manually approve releases.
Even with strong intentions around safety, this created friction:
- Releases queued in staging
- Bug fixes waited longer to reach customers
- Engineers had to coordinate who would deploy
- Operational overhead increased
Slow CI/CD Pipelines
Pipelines also became slower as the platform expanded.
Testing environments needed to validate increasingly complex customer workflows, including:
- IP Transit provisioning
- DDoS integrations
- Port reuse scenarios
- Link aggregation
- Product combinations
As more features were introduced, test execution times naturally increased.
Solving Reliability First
One of the most important lessons from Inter.link’s journey was simple:
Speed is meaningless if you can’t trust your pipelines.
If tests pass inconsistently—or fail for reasons unrelated to the code—developers lose confidence and progress slows.
To solve this, the team focused heavily on consistency.
Standardised Local and CI Environments
Developers and CI pipelines now use the same commands, tooling, and workflows wherever possible.
That means:
- The same build processes
- The same test commands
- Reproducible environments
- Easier debugging when issues occur
This reduces the classic problem of:
“It works on my machine.”
Better Environment Isolation
Shared resources between test environments can cause collisions and unpredictable failures.
Inter.link improved test isolation so multiple engineers could run pipelines simultaneously without stepping on each other’s work.
The result: engineers could trust their pipelines again and move faster with confidence.
Making Pipelines Faster Through Parallelisation
Once reliability improved, attention turned to speed.
The team analysed where time was spent and optimised the sluggish parts first.
That included:
- Running independent tests in parallel
- Using multiple workers for backend tasks
- Creating multiple test environments simultaneously
- Improving hardware and build efficiency
- Reducing unnecessary test data
The result was not only incredibly faster pipelines—but smarter pipelines capable of validating more scenarios with greater confidence.
Moving Toward Continuous Delivery
With stronger automation and more reliable testing, Inter.link was able to reduce reliance on manual release gates.
This is where modern engineering principles become transformative.
Instead of waiting for scheduled deployments or manual approvals, Inter.link moved to continuous delivery — where changes flow into production safely, frequently, and with minimal friction.
That creates major benefits:
Faster Customer Improvements
New features and fixes reach users sooner.
Lower Risk Per Release
Smaller, incremental changes are easier to monitor and roll back if needed.
Better Engineering Focus
Teams spend less time coordinating releases and more time building products.
Why Monitoring and Rollback Still Matter
Automation does not eliminate responsibility—it increases the need for operational discipline.
When deploying frequently, you also need:
- Strong observability
- Real-time alerts
- Clear rollback procedures
- Safe database migration strategies
- Zero-downtime deployment methods
Inter.link’s approach combines speed with control, ensuring automation enhances reliability rather than compromising it.
Future Focus: Reducing Complexity
One of the most important takeaways wasn’t about adding more – it was about doing less, better.
Growth should not only mean adding more code. It should also mean simplifying systems over time.
Inter.link’s future engineering priorities include:
- Smarter test selection
- Removing duplicate tests
- Refactoring common product logic
- Expanding real network validation
- Reducing operational complexity
- Building more scalable internal platforms
This mindset helps ensure long-term agility as the company continues to grow.
What This Means for Customers
For Inter.link customers, strong software delivery impacts how quickly and reliably services work in the real world.
It enables:
- Faster provisioning
- More reliable connectivity changes
- Transparent service management
- Rapid product innovation
- Scalable support for complex requirements
Whether ordering IP Transit in Madrid, activating services across Europe, or integrating connectivity via API, customers benefit from the engineering systems operating behind the scenes.
Automation as a Competitive Advantage
The next generation of connectivity providers won’t be defined by fibre and router capacity alone — but by the software that controls it.
Inter.link’s investment in CI/CD, automation, testing, and operational excellence demonstrates how next-generation network providers can deliver telecom-grade infrastructure with cloud-like speed and usability.
As demand for flexible, high-performance connectivity continues to grow, that combination of network strength and software excellence becomes a powerful competitive advantage.
Thank you for reading this article!
To watch the full presentation by Poh Chiat Koh, click here.
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If your business needs modern IP Transit, DDoS protection, or scalable connectivity backed by automation-first operations, Inter.link is built for the next generation of networking.
