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.

Related jobs
Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.

test

Milly
Vienna, Austria

Intermediate

test

Milly
Vienna, Austria

Intermediate

Featured Partners

Related Articles

View all articles
LM
Luis Minvielle
Developers share the most interesting tech they ever built
Most people's first thoughts about Hacker News revolve around venture capital, stock prices, company valuations, and $1499 dongles. But what if we told you that Hacker News could also be a place for pure, consummate, wholesome content that tackles ho...
Developers share the most interesting tech they ever built
CH
Chris Heilmann
All the videos of Halfstack London 2024!
Last month was Halfstack London, a conference about the web, JavaScript and half a dozen other things. We were there to deliver a talk, but also to record all the sessions and we're happy to share them with you. It took a bit as we had to wait for th...
All the videos of Halfstack London 2024!
CH
Chris Heilmann
WWC24 Talk - Brenda Romero - Stay: Surviving and Thriving in Tech
Brenda Romero discusses her tech career journey, overcoming burnout, and inspiring future game developers at WWC24.Here is what she had to say in the video:Hey everyone! Thanks for joining us!Reflections on a Rough YearLast year, I gave a talk about ...
WWC24 Talk - Brenda Romero - Stay: Surviving and Thriving in Tech

From learning to earning

Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.