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World Congress 2023 • Sep 21, 2023

Reducing Cognitive Overload Through Platform Engineering

Llywelyn Griffith-Swain

How did Vodafone cut time-to-production from months to under 20 minutes for 7,000 software engineers? By building a zero-touch engineering platform that eliminates cognitive overload.

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#1 about 2 min

Introduction to the speaker and engineering background

Operations and site reliability experiences build the foundation for scaling digital teams.

#2 about 2 min

Defining cognitive overload and platform engineering concepts

Complex tooling ecosystems hinder focus by overwhelming developers with operational requirements.

#3 about 2 min

Scaling digital engineering through the technology mission

Transforming into a digital technology company requires effectively onboarding thousands of software engineers.

#4 about 3 min

Navigating organizational complexity and misaligned microservice teams

Unchecked microservice expansion leads to configuration drift and blurred operational responsibilities across teams.

#5 about 2 min

Adopting infrastructure as code for reliable platform delivery

Disposable and version-controlled infrastructure artifacts ensure reproducible deployments and reliable system rollbacks.

#6 about 4 min

Automating service provisioning through developer self-service tools

Self-service pipelines automatically configure code repositories with integrated security and telemetry defaults.

#7 about 3 min

Enforcing zero-touch immutability across all development environments

Removing manual environment access forces state consistency and dramatically reduces expected recovery times.

#8 about 3 min

Creating a global inner-source platform engineering strategy

Uniting global cloud engineering teams standardizes deployment tooling and prevents redundant development efforts.

#9 about 2 min

Demoing the internal developer platform self-service interface

Automated provisioning user interfaces reduce complex idea-to-production workflows to mere minutes.

#10 about 3 min

Composing internal platforms with reusable open source modules

Stitching together modular open source components shared across regions rapidly accelerates platform development.

#11 about 2 min

Measuring the business impact of standardized platform architecture

High initial investments in foundational automation drastically reduce regional capability onboarding times.

#12 about 3 min

Building a shopping cart experience for infrastructure provisioning

Future catalog models will allow software teams to confidently assemble custom technology stacks.

#13 about 7 min

Audience questions on platform costs and change management

Addressing platform friction requires transparent architectural cost routing and well-researched internal change proposals.

Matching moments

1:43 min

Summarizing the organizational benefits of platform engineering

Christian Strack · LIVE

1:20 min

Pivoting product strategy toward platform engineering

Alejandro Albuerne Alejandro Albuerne · World Congress 2026 Europe

3:20 min

Architecting the platform with modern cloud and mobile technologies

Tom George · LIVE

1:43 min

Shifting focus from platform engineering to developer productivity

Robert Hoffmann Robert Hoffmann +1 · LIVE

3:57 min

Scaling engineering teams using internal developer platforms

Moataz Nabil Moataz Nabil · World Congress 2026 Europe

1:03 min

Defining platform engineering as a sociotechnical discipline

Christian Strack · LIVE

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