In 2021 Move.com was over-indexed on microservices with hundreds of API endpoints deployed across a constellation of runtimes with varying access patterns. Their developers enjoyed the autonomy to build and expose their services as they saw fit, but ultimately this led to overwhelming complexity for client teams, duplicated effort for standard functionality, and a wide surface of APIs to secure and manage. This talk will detail how the team was able to leverage Kubernetes and an open-source K8s operator to accelerate release cycles, deployment time and cost savings while still giving their development teams the autonomy they needed to move quickly. This talk will be helpful for anyone looking to build out a cloud-native API platform organization. We will chronicle how the intersection of people, process and tools helped 100x their developer productivity.