Infrastructure WebConf
Europe Volume 6

At Thoughtworks, we believe in you-build-it-you-run-it. Our software developers and infrastructure specialists are responsible for the knowledge, ideas, and hands-on implementation skills needed to deliver and run software services. They help our clients adopt DevOps approaches, break out of rigid, traditional ways of working and move to a more customer-focused and agile approach.

Our cross-functional teams contain developers, infrastructure specialists and product experts. They build developer experience platforms, CI/CD systems, infrastructure automation using practices like infrastructure-as-code and observability capabilities.

At Infrastructure WebConf subject matter experts explore best practices and thought-provoking learnings on application-driven infrastructure engineering, corporate security and platform building in our sixth edition of Infra WebConf Europe.

The recordings of the last event are now available.

Infrastructure WebConf Vol. 6

Head in the Clouds

Jonathan Carrillo

Using simulations to tackle cyberattacks

Rushil Gala-Shah

“Click-Click” Data Product

Lou Franklin and Clemence Burnichon

5 things we learned building an enterprise cloud platform on GCP at PAYBACK

Georgios Chinis & Thomas Falkenberg

Agenda

October 13, 2022

Head in the Clouds

Jonathan Carrillo

We're used to considering technical and financial concerns when selecting cloud technologies. How fast is it? How much is it? Does it support my programming language? We are less used to consider the human side. Platforms are springing up inside technology organisations across the world, in a large part motivated by simplifying the workload of product developers. But we also need to care about the strain we are placing on infrastructure and platform professionals, who are being confronted with an explosion of complexity as more and more tools are released in this space. In this talk, Jonathan and María will discuss the role that cognitive load plays in choosing and using cloud technologies.

Using simulations to tackle cyberattacks

Rushil Gala-Shah

Having secure infrastructure has always been an important part of building platforms. With cyberattacks becoming more and more frequent, more companies are ensuring that there is a focus placed on cybersecurity. Last year, we embarked on an approach that simulated multiple scenarios using two teams: a blue team and a red team. The blue team played the role of an organisation that was building a few services and the underlying infrastructure whilst the red team played the role of the attackers attempting to capture the flags planted by the blue team. There were a lot of interesting discoveries along the way and Rushil will share the journey as well as some of the learnings from this approach.

“Click-Click” Data Product

Lou Franklin and Clemence Burnichon

One of the central principles of data mesh is an ability to self-serve data infrastructure in order to support the federation and ownership of data products. From the inception of the data mesh project at ITV our aspiration has been to provide any users with an ability to quickly and easily create and deploy data products, without the need for any platform technical knowledge. Join us in this talk to discuss what it has meant to put self-service at the heart of ITVs data mesh platform implementation and how this journey has and continues to evolve. What does it look like to build infrastructure with developer self-service as a core tenant, how this has shaped the structure of our components and how we have worked to deliver value at multiple stages of evolution.

5 things we learned building an enterprise cloud platform on GCP at PAYBACK

Georgios Chinis and Thomas Falkenberg

If you are new to the cloud or have difficulties scaling and maintaining your cloud platform without jeopardizing compliance, security and stability, this session is for you. One year ago we started from almost zero to a running platform for multiple product teams based on the Google Cloud Platform. We made a lot of decisions on the way and are constantly challenged to find the right balance between standardization and compliance and team autonomy. I will share our major learnings which range from why bother with cloud in the first place, to tuning cloudbuild and terraform executions up to running a successful platform team and how to collaborate with product teams.