Beyond DevOps: The rise of full-stack platform engineering | Peter Birkholm-Buch

Thank you. I hope the crowd is here for the content - because I didn't bring any beer. [audience laughs] And definitely, we're in the wrong room. We should be in next door. Thank you for showing up. I'm Peter. I run software engineering in a department called Growth Products. We changed names quite a few times over the past few years. I have Elina with me here in the front row, she used to be on my team as well. We do primarily e-commerce stuff. So, we sell beer. But we do a bunch of other stuff as well. And over the time, we've managed to intake a lot of different products, - all on different kinds of technologies, done by different people over time. And we struggled trying to integrate all of that in a clever way. So, this is part of that. Before we do anything, I want to show you guys - a short one-minute snippet of the video that we did with GitHub, - which explains a little bit about Carlsberg and why we are here - and how we do software. [calm music] This may look like tasty beer. And it is. But it's so much more than that. It's hundreds of years of legacy, - science, - and mastery. Started in 1847, the Carlsberg Group is one of the leading brewers in the world. Carlsberg invented the pH scale. They discovered how to purify brewing yeast and shared it with the world. And they're committed to a zero carbon footprint in the years ahead. But today, this beer also represents thousands of lines of code, - a digital transformation, - security embedded in the workflow, - and the world's most widely adopted AI developer tool. Because this is Carlsberg beer. And they use GitHub. [music ends] [audience laughs] Not trying to make a plug for GitHub, - but it was what kind of started everything. Before we go ahead, is there any developers in the room? Thank God. Dark mode. [audience laughs] Yeah, it's all downhill from here. [audience laughs] This is the story of how we got started - about five years ago to where we are today. So, some of the things I'll tell you, you're probably going to go, - "Oh God, we're already doing that. And why didn't you do that sooner?" But remember, this is where we were five years ago. So, bear with me. A few things happen in parallel, and then in the end, - we'll get to the full stack platform developer, - which I think is a nice play on the full stack developer. But anyway. So, in the beginning, we had this really horrible house - that was built on every conceivable technology known to man - that you will find everywhere in every company - if they've done something for a little bit of time. We had a bunch of different things for source code. Think of one, we had it. We had a bunch of different things for CI/CD, - and we had a bunch of different things for storing artifacts. And it forced our developers to get out of their flow all the time. So, imagine that you're doing something, - I don't know, writing, and you need a pair of scissors or something. So, you have to pick up your paper and go to another desk, the scissor desk, - do your paper cutting and then come back to your writing desk. That's what it was like to be a developer. They had to jump around all these - different platforms and hoops and remember all their passwords and everything. And it was a major hassle. So, right about at that time, - around five years ago, GitHub Actions came out. I think they stole it from Azure DevOps. Does anyone agree? And we thought, hmm, this looks pretty cool. Why don't we try and see if we can consolidate everything on GitHub? So, that's what we did. So, we turned GitHub into our software development platform, - and we got rid of a lot of other stuff. We got rid of GitLab, Bitbucket, - ADO, Jenkins, Nexus, SonarQube, a bunch of stuff. We use packages for container images. And it just made the lives of our developers a lot easier, - because now they had to worry only about a single platform. And it totally streamlined our workflow for developers, - so they no longer had to jump around hoops everywhere. So, if ways kind of said they don't exist. Because there is no way for anyone to know everything. But I think what we managed to do here with our DevOps team is that we, - because they're now thinking of this, - of the way that they build infrastructure as a product, - so they're now thinking of the developers as their customers. So, they're now, okay, how can we enhance this? How can we turn this into a product where developers are our customers, - and they don't have to worry about anything? So, then they started gold plating, right? So, now when you're rolling out infrastructure, - we create dashboards automatically in Datadog. So, if you were rolling out code, - we have dashboards created automatically for you. We have documentation created automatically for you. We have API specifications rolled out to our API platform automatically. It's pretty cool. And it's basically the product, our DevOps guys, - they don't have anything left to do other than to maintain this thing, - because the developers do all the work on their own. So, I think that's how we went - from assembly language to really creating products for our developers. It's how we allowed our DevOps guys to stop being DevOps guys, - to start being more of full-stack platform engineering type people. They're creating products for our developers to use. They're not Ops people anymore. So, I think that is how we use this Gaia product. I'll put out a blog post. I've had many requests - to detail what it is. I'll write something up. We used it to elevate our DevOps people from being, - go create this piece of infrastructure for me and do it yesterday, - to being people who are actually now building - an infrastructure deployment product, - and they're now product people rather than DevOps people. And that is how we found out - that full-stack platform engineers - are as rare and valuable as dinosaur unicorns. And we all know that dinosaur unicorns are pretty special. [applause] Thank you. [outro music] [music ends]