Infrastructure & Ops Superstream: Platform Engineering Best Practices

Sam Newman: Introduction (5 minutes) - 8:00am PT | 11:00am ET | 4:00pm UTC/GMT

• Sam Newman welcomes you to the Infrastructure & Ops Superstream.

Adora Nwodo: Platform Engineering in 3D—Design, Deploy, Dominate! (35 minutes) - 8:05am PT | 11:05am ET | 4:05pm UTC/GMT

• Distributed systems are everywhere, and they power our lives. From social media to work productivity tools and even our favorite streaming services, these systems form the backbone of modern technology. As companies increasingly adopt cloud native architectures to support these distributed systems, the complexity of managing large cloud workloads grows exponentially, making platform engineering teams a critical necessity. Adora Nwodo discusses how to leverage platform engineering principles to build scalable and maintainable infrastructure, implement efficient CI/CD pipelines, and establish comprehensive observability frameworks that keep your systems running smoothly. By understanding the critical role of platform engineers, you’ll gain a clear perspective on how they enable businesses to scale confidently and dominate.
• Adora Nwodo is a digital creator and the founder of NexaScale, an ed-tech nonprofit providing simulated work experience for more than 10,500 software engineers, designers, and product managers. She's also an engineering manager and an award-winning senior software engineer who was recognized as the 2024 Change Maker of the Year (Tech) at the Impact Leadership Global Awards in Dubai, UAE. She’s passionate about the cloud and emerging technologies and is the author of Cloud Engineering for Beginners, Beginning Azure DevOps, and Confident Cloud. She’s also vice president of the Nigerian chapter of the VR/AR Association, where she works to create awareness of virtual and augmented reality technologies.

Juliano Martins and Marcelo Quadros: Platform and NoOps—How Mercado Livre Platform Manages 30,000 Microservices and 25 Million RPS (35 minutes) - 8:40am PT | 11:40am ET | 4:40pm UTC/GMT

• Operating the largest e-commerce, fintech, and logistics platform in Latin America comes with complex challenges. Mercado Libre manages over 30,000 microservices, provides NoOps solutions to 16,000 developers, and handles 25 million requests per second. The company relies on Fury, its internal developer platform to meet the demands. Fury simplifies infrastructure management, reduces cognitive load, and accelerates software delivery, enabling Mercado Libre’s engineers to focus on creating exceptional products for 110 million active users. Juliano Martins and Marcelo Quadros explore how Fury has driven the company’s shift to a NoOps model, automating tasks like code management and observability while prioritizing developer experience. They also discuss their multicloud strategy, which ensures flexibility and resilience as the company scales.
• Juliano Martins is a technical manager on the cloud and platform team at Mercado Libre, where he plays a key role in shaping Fury. With over two decades of experience in the IT industry, he’s a seasoned tech leader and coder with a passion for tackling complex projects, building and mentoring high-impact teams of platform engineers and full-cycle developers, and fostering a culture of innovation and collaboration. His deep proficiency in cloud technologies spans AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure, where he’s consistently delivered scalable, cloud native solutions.
• Marcelo Quadros is a software expert who contributes to the development of Fury on the cloud and platform team at Mercado Libre Brazil, the largest marketplace in Latin America. With over 15 years of experience, he has specialized in developing and architecting complex systems across various domains. Outside of work, he enjoys spending time with his daughter and attending rock concerts.
• Break (5 minutes)

Ama Asare: Cultural Shifts to Adopt When You Start Your Platform Journey (35 minutes) - 9:20am PT | 12:20pm ET | 5:20pm UTC/GMT

• Ama Asare shares some of the common choices organizations make that slow down adoption of their internal developer portals (IDPs) and act as obstacles to realizing anticipated benefits of these engineering platforms. From her experience helping clients build their IDPs at Thoughtworks, she recommends cultural shifts you can adopt to speed up your path to benefits such as business agility, innovation, and developer productivity. These include treating and funding the internal platform like a product, with developers as customers; self-service as a first-class citizen, not an afterthought; and automation and compliance-as-code in place of ticket ops.
• Ama Asare is an engineering leader with over a decade of experience as a software developer, architect, technical lead, and consultant. Her current focus is on simplifying complexity in engineering orgs through the lens of business-tech alignment, value driven changes, DevOps, and people, in order to drive business results and improve engineer happiness.

Moo Olaniyan: How CircleCI’s Field Engineer Team Uses Custom Terraform Modules and K8s to Deliver Highly Tailored Enterprise Demos (Sponsored by CircleCI) (30 minutes) 9:55am PT | 12:55pm ET | 5:55pm UTC/GMT

• CircleCI’s field engineering team faced significant challenges posed by traditional enterprise demo setups, including inconsistencies, manual efforts, and security vulnerabilities. Given the urgent need for a more standardized approach, the team harnessed the power of Kubernetes alongside Terraform to build a modular, automated demo environment. This environment mirrors enterprise infrastructure, enhancing demo consistency and customer engagement. You’ll discover how leveraging Kubernetes not only streamlined operations and bolstered security practices but also transformed the way demos are delivered.
• Moo Olaniyan is a senior field engineer at CircleCI, where he leverages his expertise in continuous integration and deployment to help teams streamline their development processes. Previously, he wrote software for autonomous boats, built out DevOps pipelines in-house, and scaled solutions to enterprise customers, honing his skills in cloud infrastructure, automation, and performance optimization. Moo is committed to fostering a culture of innovation and knowledge-sharing and frequently engages with the developer community through workshops, marketing events, and webinars. When he’s not working, he enjoys exploring new technologies, making music, volleyball, and travel.
• This session will be followed by a 30-minute Q&A in a breakout room. Stop by if you have more questions for Moo.
• Break (5 minutes)

David Grizzanti and Ahmed Bebars: What We Learned Designing and Securing a Multi-Tenant Developer Platform (35 minutes) - 10:30am PT | 1:30pm ET | 6:30pm UTC/GMT

• Building and architecting a secure, user-friendly, scalable developer platform within the cloud is challenging, especially when your internal users may not have a strong incentive to use it. A cloud strategy that encourages centralizing to a single cloud provider poses a problem for teams that previously had the autonomy to choose their own paths and tools. So, David Grizzanti and Ahmed Bebars designed a platform to be agnostic to underlying cloud-specific managed services. They tell you how they built a multi-tenant platform in the cloud that included a secure and isolated environment for engineering service teams on top of centralized Kubernetes clusters; a centralized approach to CI/CD, including standard build and test pipelines; a managed ingress layer; and paved paths for new and existing applications.
• David Grizzanti is a principal engineer at The New York Times, enhancing developer productivity by enabling efficient software development and deployment. Previously a Distinguished Engineer at Comcast, he led the creation of multi-tenant software platforms for millions of customers in North America. His interests include infrastructure automation, open source communities, and engineering leadership.
• Ahmed Bebars is a principal engineer on the delivery engineering team at The New York Times, specializing in cloud infrastructure technologies, with a focus on developing robust and scalable Kubernetes-based solutions and crafting a secure and flexible runtime environment that empowers service teams to swiftly and efficiently deploy their applications. Previously, he was a senior backend engineer at Hello Fresh and an application development lead at Wireless Network Group.

Chiradeep Vittal: Modern Platform Engineering—Adapting to the LLM Revolution (35 minutes) - 11:05am PT | 2:05pm ET | 7:05pm UTC/GMT

• The advent of large language models such as ChatGPT has initiated a transformative phase in application development comparable to the cloud era. Businesses are rapidly integrating AI capabilities into their applications, resulting in a surge of AI-driven services, autonomous agents, and innovative multimedia content. Platform engineering must evolve to support these advancements, addressing new challenges in scalability, security, governance, and ethical AI deployment. Chiradeep Vittal explores the most recent trends and obstacles in embedding LLMs into platform architectures, using a practical AI application as a case study. You’ll gain valuable insights into maintaining the balance between leveraging AI innovations and adhering to fundamental platform engineering principles.
• Chiradeep Vittal is an expert in cloud computing with a deep focus on infrastructure, security, and scalability. He has contributed significantly to Apache CloudStack, a leading open source private cloud operating system. As a Distinguished Engineer at Citrix, he led efforts to adapt its products for modern platform teams. He has shared his insights and knowledge as a speaker at various industry conferences, offering valuable perspectives on the evolution of cloud computing. At Lendistry, a tech-forward lending platform built in the cloud, he led platform, security, data, and product teams while exploring and deploying LLM and ML-based solutions. Lately he has been working on a tool to simplify the lifecycle management of AI/agent development.

Sam Newman: Closing Remarks (5 minutes) - 11:40am PT | 2:40pm ET | 7:40pm UTC/GMT

• Sam Newman closes out today’s event.