One Platform Could Not Fit Them All

Building a platform sounds like the right move until every team starts building its own.

And they were all right and all wrong. Developers had real reasons such as different products, different constraints, and different levels of cloud and Kubernetes experience. One platform could not fit them all, but dozens of platforms did not scale either.

In this talk, we share how one of the world’s largest retail companies addressed this tension by building an open source platform framework. The goal was not to deliver a single product, but to provide a foundation that enables teams to build and own their own platform distribution while sharing common standards and practices. It supports everything from cloud only environments using managed services to edge platforms running across 15,000 retail locations.

You will learn why Kubernetes alone was not enough, how GitOps became the common language between teams, and how we combined existing CNCF projects instead of creating new tools. We will walk through how the framework works in practice, show a production ready distribution built on top of it, and explain how teams can adopt the approach step by step without becoming platform experts overnight.

Finally, we share our lessons learned from scaling the framework across many teams, fostering an inner source culture, and preparing the project for open source.