Stories
June 9

Building a platform for thousands of bots in the cloud

We share our journey of building an Internal Developer Platform on AWS, which started over eight years at Ocado Technology. From e-commerce to warehouse robotics, we have a wide variety of workloads that developers run. In this talk you’ll learn the key components of a successful platform, the vital metrics every platform engineer should know, and how we’ve used managed cloud services to do the heavy lifting.‍
Talk abstract

Building a DevOps culture has proven to be a valuable investment for organisations looking to grow developer autonomy and scale up. But over time we’ve see that “Devs don’t want to do ops”, and instead focus on what matters to them. This talk is about the journey of building our Internal Developer Platform. Early on we treated our platform as a product and applied software product development methods to how we’ve built it. We’ll show you how we measure productivity, what metrics we use to drive platform direction, and how we build guardrails and security baselines that simplify the task of security for developers. Attendees will learn how the Ocado Technology Platform has helped our organisation manage thousands of bots worldwide, allowing developers to focus on innovation and delivering value to their customers.

Key takeaways:

  • How we built our Internal Developer Platform on AWS using ECS to increase productivity, simplify deployments, and maintain our security and compliance needs.
  • The decision to abstract away the complexity of deployments, containerization, and compute infrastructure from developers; and how we measure the impact of that choice.
  • Real-world examples of how our platform has helped our organization manage thousands of bots worldwide, enabling our developers to focus on innovation and delivering value to our customers.
Alex Howard Whitaker
Sr. Staff Cloud Engineer, Ocado Technology

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