U.S. Defense Intelligence Organization Scales Secure Development Infrastructure with Multi-Tenant Coder Deployment

Company Overview

This central managed service platform operates within a U.S. Defense Intelligence Organization, providing application hosting and development infrastructure to thousands of military developers. Operating on AWS infrastructure, the platform serves as a professional services and approval layer on top of cloud resources, enabling Air Force mission teams to deploy secure applications without rebuilding infrastructure from scratch.

The platform currently supports approximately 30,000 end users and serves over 2,500 developers across multiple mission areas. The organization is slated to quadruple in size over the next several years as more mission groups migrate to the centralized platform. The engineering team recognized early that providing standardized development environments would be critical to their mission: enabling small, specialized teams to build mission-critical applications quickly while maintaining the strict security and compliance requirements inherent to military operations.

The Challenge

The platform team faced a challenge common across government agencies: how to provide secure, compliant development infrastructure at scale without forcing every mission team to reinvent the wheel.

Before adopting Coder, small mission teams of 20-30 engineers working on specialized intelligence applications had to provision their own complete infrastructure stack. Each team needed to set up their own Amazon EKS clusters, configure security controls, obtain separate Authority to Operate certifications, and maintain their environments independently. This approach created multiple problems: duplicated effort across teams, inconsistent security postures, delayed project timelines, and significant administrative overhead.

The compliance burden was particularly acute. Every deployment required going through the full ATO process, which meant security reviews, documentation, and approval workflows before developers could even begin building applications. For small teams with urgent mission requirements, this overhead was unsustainable.

The customer’s team needed a solution that would allow them to provide development infrastructure as a service to their internal customers while maintaining the strict security controls required for intelligence operations. The platform had to support multiple isolated tenant organizations while running on a single, centrally managed infrastructure.

The Solution

The platform team discovered Coder through the open source community and began testing it 18 months before their formal purchase. The evaluation took 6 months, during which the team validated Coder's capabilities through both open source testing and trial licenses. After confirming the platform met their security and multi-tenancy requirements, the organization purchased the enterprise version one year ago.

The platform team deployed Coder on AWS infrastructure within Cloud One, the Air Force's enterprise cloud environment. The implementation leverages Amazon EKS for container orchestration, EC2 instances including GPU-enabled instances for specialized workloads, and AWS Secrets Manager for secure credential management. The architecture integrates natively with AWS services, positioning the platform for future capabilities including planned Bedrock integration as AI features expand across Air Force systems.

Pioneering Multi-Tenancy in Military Development

This customer’s' deployment establishes the U.S. military's first true multi-tenant Coder implementation. This architecture allows the platform to serve multiple independent mission groups from a single Coder installation while maintaining strict isolation between organizations. The multi-tenant model addresses a critical challenge in government operations: how to provide enterprise-grade development infrastructure to small, specialized teams without requiring each team to build and certify their own systems.

The impact is immediate and measurable. A 20-person mission team working on a specialized intelligence application can now access production-ready development environments on day one. Teams no longer spend months provisioning infrastructure, configuring security controls, or navigating the ATO certification process independently. Instead, they inherit the security posture, compliance approvals, and operational standards that the customers has already established at the platform level.

This multi-tenant approach transforms infrastructure from a barrier into an enabler. Mission teams focus entirely on building applications that serve their intelligence objectives, while the customer handles the complexity of maintaining secure, compliant, and scalable development infrastructure. The centralized model also creates efficiency gains that compound over time. As more mission groups join the platform, the collective investment in security controls, operational tooling, and compliance documentation benefits all tenants without requiring additional overhead from individual teams.

"The platform has already deployed Coder and completed the ATO process. Mission teams get immediate access to secure, standardized development environments rather than spending months on infrastructure setup. Coder provides the governed foundation we need to support intelligence operations across multiple mission areas while maintaining the strict isolation and compliance controls that we require." - Platform Engineering Leader

With Coder, the platform delivers:

• Pre-certified environments that inherit platform-level ATO approvals, eliminating redundant compliance workflows
  
• Rapid provisioning that allows new mission teams to start development immediately
  
• Centralized governance maintaining security controls across all tenant organizations from a single control plane
  
• Scalable architecture supporting current operations and positioned for substantial growth

The Results

Since implementing Coder, the platform has transformed how Defense Intelligence Organization developers build and deploy mission-critical applications.

Infrastructure Efficiency and Scale

The platform currently supports 85+ internal team members who use Coder to build and manage the services offered to their customers. More significantly, they provide Coder access to approximately 2,500 Air Force developers across multiple mission groups. As organizations like NASIC (National Air and Space Intelligence Center) migrate their development teams to the platform, adoption continues to accelerate.

Multi-Tenancy as a Force Multiplier

The multi-tenant architecture eliminates infrastructure duplication across mission teams. Small engineering groups that previously would have needed weeks or months to set up their own development infrastructure can now start building immediately. A 20-person team working on a specialized intelligence application accesses enterprise-grade development environments without dedicating resources to infrastructure setup, security reviews, or ATO certification processes.

Security and Compliance

By centralizing the ATO process at the platform level, the organization eliminates redundant security reviews for every mission team. Development environments are pre-approved and pre-configured with appropriate security controls, allowing developers to focus on building applications rather than managing compliance paperwork. This consolidation reduces both risk and administrative burden across the organization.

AWS Integration and Future Readiness

The seamless integration with AWS Cloud One infrastructure positions the customer for continued evolution. The platform leverages EKS, EC2 (including GPU instances), and Secrets Manager, with planned integration of AWS Bedrock for AI-powered development capabilities as those features roll out across Air Force systems.

Looking Ahead

With their multi-tenant Coder infrastructure established, the platform is positioned to expand support across the Air Force. Additional intelligence organizations are already planning to migrate their applications and development teams to the platform. As the Air Force continues its digital transformation initiatives, this centralized approach to development infrastructure will enable rapid scaling without proportional increases in administrative overhead.

The team is also exploring integration with AWS Bedrock to bring AI-powered development capabilities to their mission teams, building on the secure foundation they've established with Coder.

Conclusion

For this Defense Intelligence Organization platform, adopting Coder solved more than just the technical challenge of providing development environments. It created a sustainable model for enabling innovation across military intelligence operations while maintaining the security and compliance standards that defense missions demand.

By establishing the military's first true multi-tenant Coder deployment, the platform demonstrates how centralized infrastructure-as-a-service can accelerate mission-critical development without compromising security. Small teams get enterprise-grade capabilities without enterprise-level overhead, and the Air Force gains a scalable platform that can grow with evolving mission requirements.