"Building the Plane While It's Flying"
summary
A mid‑stage startup of ~100 people with ~35 engineers and 2.1 ops moves from Heroku to Kubernetes starting 2018, migrates the first app early 2019 and most apps by year’s end, and replaces a vanished platform team with cross‑functional, time‑boxed working groups. They choose Harness for deploys, run clusters, and adopt helm buildpacks and pack/scaffold to run dev in cluster instead of 18‑container laptops. They enforce docs in Confluence, treat the platform as a product, use forum‑style async communication, and require “this is the way” for new work.
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chapters (16)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:28Commercial
- 1:38Field Wrap
- 3:04Who am I
- 3:35Timeline of an effort
- 7:00What we learned
- 9:40Productize it
- 10:33Platform teams
- 14:05Making the decision
- 15:40The plan
- 16:19Execution
- 17:42Rethinking
- 19:57You are not on this team forever
- 21:23observability
- 22:42documentation
- 26:39Denver Nuggets
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