Building an Internal Developer Platform in a hybrid cloud scenario

During this talk we will describe the Yoox Net-A-Porter journey of implementing an Internal Developer Platform. We’ll cover how this fulfiled the needs of a large number of development teams in a hybrid scenario (cloud + on-prem), and explain the different phases throughout the years including:  

• The creation of highly skilled domain teams focused on central management of specific tools, providing different capabilities such as CI/CD, monitoring, and automation through IaC
• The creation of a dedicated platform and the definition of a new organizational model. The aim of which was to combine platform capabilities (which at the time were mostly around DevOps capabilities) and fulfil the needs of a new centralized team combining DevOps and SRE roles
• The "bottleneck" phase where the platform struggled to manage all the requests (now coming from both the DevOps / SRE central team and the development teams) due to missing self-service capabilities and gaps in the collaborative model
• The maturity phase where we reviewed the platform approach with a focus on the developer experience and the implementation of platforming tools. This is where we were able to glue together different pieces (tools and services) built during previous years. All of these while providing an effort on rationalisation for overlapping tools and cost control.

During the talk we will give an overview on how we structured the organization for the platform project and how YNAP approached DevOps, SRE, and Platform Engineer roles. We will finish the talk by providing the current challenges we’re facing and working on, as well as the future direction for the platform.

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