Llywelyn Griffith-Swain
Reducing Cognitive Overload Through Platform Engineering
#1about 1 minute
Defining cognitive overload and platform engineering
Cognitive overload is the limit on information processing, while platform engineering builds frameworks to enable developers safely and quickly.
#2about 1 minute
Vodafone's mission to become a technology company
Vodafone's "Tech 2025" initiative aims to transform the company by hiring 7,000 software engineers and building in-house scaled platforms.
#3about 2 minutes
The initial challenges of scaling microservices
As engineering teams scaled, they faced misaligned teams, environment drift, and a lack of end-to-end ownership for services.
#4about 2 minutes
Establishing core infrastructure as code principles
Key principles like immutability, disposability, and version control for all code and configuration were established to ensure consistency.
#5about 3 minutes
The first platform solution using a Slack bot
A Slack bot automated the creation of repositories, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure, abstracting away complexity for developers.
#6about 3 minutes
Applying IaC principles to achieve zero-touch environments
By removing all manual access and rebuilding environments through code, the team achieved consistency and improved availability by 1.5%.
#7about 2 minutes
Lessons learned and the shift to a global platform
The initial UK-based platform was successful but siloed, leading to a new global strategy called TAZ (Telco as a Service) to unify standards.
#8about 1 minute
Demo of the new global platform (TAZ)
A walkthrough shows how the new platform enables developers to create and deploy a new service to production in under 20 minutes.
#9about 2 minutes
How the global platform reuses open source components
The platform is built by stitching together reusable, open-source modules from different global teams, such as Argo CD and EKS modules.
#10about 4 minutes
The business impact and future platform vision
The platform enables global scale and developer autonomy, with a future vision of a "shopping cart" experience for infrastructure components.
#11about 7 minutes
Q&A on cost, adoption, and open source plans
The discussion covers cost management, gaining team buy-in through white papers, and the ambition to fully open-source the platform.
Related jobs
Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.
Featured Partners
Related Videos
30:56Unlocking the potential of Digital & IT at Vodafone
Ulrich Irnich
28:16Navigating the Corporate Jungle: Life as a Developer in a large Company
Alexandra Petri
26:47Let developers develop again
Kai Geißelhardt & Volker Zöpfel
58:18How to make a 4 day week work for everyone
Kit Barclay & Jake Levine
32:00Throwing off the burdens of scale in engineering
David Singleton & Thomas Pamminger
32:49Sustainable Mobility – Giravolta
Jordi Abad
55:18An Architect’s guide to reducing the carbon footprint of your applications
Ricardo Sueiras Sueiras
58:40Platform Engineering vs. DevOps Why not both?
Christian Strack
From learning to earning
Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.
Senior Software Engineer
Aeon
Winterthur, Switzerland
Remote
€70-140K
Senior
JavaScript
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
DevOps/Cloud Engineer
Vodafone Group Plc.
Municipality of Madrid, Spain
Remote
Intermediate
Bash
Perl
Azure
Linux
+15
Platform Engineer -observability Engineer
IF-Solutions
Arnhem, Netherlands
Grafana
Prometheus
Elasticsearch
Continuous Integration
Software Engineer, Platform - London, United Kingdom
Speechify
Charing Cross, United Kingdom
€53K
Go
Java
React
Python
+2