Llywelyn Griffith-Swain

Reducing Cognitive Overload Through Platform Engineering

How do you solve developer cognitive overload at massive scale? Learn how Vodafone's platform engineering initiative cut time-to-production by 97% with zero-touch environments.

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.

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Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.

Platform Engineer (m/w/d)

Qvest Digital AG
Bonn, Germany

Remote
Intermediate
Senior
Terraform
Continuous Integration
Cloud (AWS/Google/Azure)