From duct tape to declarative: Playtika's platform overhaul at unicorn scale

Success is a double-edged sword. As the gaming industry boomed, Playtika’s platform could not keep pace. What was once manageable became chaos: Ansible scripts, imperative Jenkins pipelines, a sprawl of internal portals, and everyone doing automation their own way.

Environments took days to spin up. Onboarding was guesswork. Some parts were too fragile to touch.

This talk unpacks how Playtika modernized that mess into a CNCF-driven platform stack. Attendees learn how the company moved to declarative K8s clusters with ClusterAPI, GitOps deployments with FluxCD, and infrastructure managed through Crossplane. Internal tools were replaced with a single Backstage-powered portal, improving developer efficiency at scale.

But the real shift was not just technical. It was cultural.

Ticket ops became self-service. Teams aligned. Provisioning dropped from days to under an hour, all with OSS. If a platform feels held together with duct tape and hope, this talk shows that standardization is what scales.