Blueprints
June 9

bol.com’s journey with self-service developer platforms

This is a technical session where I’ll describe the original platform we built internally and how we replaced it with a new platform. We did this following the principles of platform engineering and by taking a product-led approach.
Talk abstract

Engineers at bol.com are no strangers to self-service developer platforms, but how do you take something good and make it great?

When bol.com decided to go to the cloud we introduced a self-service developer platform to provision resources on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This means that as a fresh hire you can spin up a new application on your first day on the job. Over time we discovered that our self-service tooling abstracted the GCP concepts away and increased the cognitive load on our engineers. 

In our initial self-service platform, we only focused on provisioning microservices. With the explosion of data science and machine learning within bol.com, we found that we needed to cater to different expertise levels as well as different workload types, be it microservices or machine learning workloads. 

In this talk we share our journey to a new self-service developer platform, paving the Golden Path and why we are embracing platform engineering.

Anastasija Efremovska
Platform Engineer, bol.com
Quiran Storey
Software Engineer, bol.com

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