Stories
How we scaled DevOps 10x with platform engineering
This talk covers how platform engineering helped us scale DevOps from serving one team of ten developers to providing services to the entire engineering organisation of ~100 people, while still keeping our team small.
Talk abstract
In late 2021 our engineering org was acquired by NielsenIQ and from that point:
- We built solid CI/CD platform for our backend team of ~10 developers and shortened deployment frequency from once a month to once an hour
- All other teams were still struggling with different custom ways to deliver software and interact with it
The biggest challenge for everyone was that the toolkit we built for CI/CD and for the backend team didn't fit well with the needs of other teams. This was because of the varying nature of their everyday jobs, including Data Science, Machine Learning, etc.
To solve these issues we:
- First sat together and brainstormed how we could do things differently
- Visualized the landscape of the infrastructure we managed and categorized it
- Discovered the Team Topologies and platform engineering movement
- Regrouped and dedicated a product owner role
- Used product techniques like Developer Journey Maps and customer interviews
- Conducted a series of interviews with users
- Came up with a set of metrics to measure Platform KPIs which helped us to prioritize
- Started implementing the metrics
Our journey is still ongoing, but there are a lot of practical insights we can share!
