From Duct Tape To Declarative: Playtika's Platform Overhaul at Unicorn Scale
Talkat Platform Engineering Day North America 2025 · on Monday, 2025-11-10· at 13:30· Building B | Level 5 | Thomas Murphy Ballroom 1·
summary
Playtika replaces sprawling Ansible and Jenkins hacks with an OSS stack: ClusterAPI + Spectro Cloud for cluster lifecycle, GitOps with FluxCD for all deployments, and Crossplane provisioning for infra while moving databases into Kubernetes. Provisioning time drops from days (day and a half) to roughly an hour, datacenter failover improves from ~60s to 13–14s, and 60% of workloads migrate in under a year. Cultural changes enforce Backstage developer portal, buy‑over‑build decisions, no direct cluster access, and measurable, data‑driven rollouts.
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chapters (20)
- 0:00Kubernetes platform overhaul intro
- 1:04Early K8s challenges
- 3:34Service mesh migration
- 6:26Vendor PKS failures
- 8:13Root causes of failures
- 10:01Cultural shifts
- 11:45Partner collaboration
- 13:11New platform strategy
- 13:31Cluster lifecycle with Cluster API
- 15:15Infrastructure with Crossplane
- 16:43GitOps with Flux and Linit
- 17:46GitOps production deploy
- 18:50Running databases natively inside Kubernetes
- 19:10Platform components
- 20:12Application dependency model
- 21:13Key takeaways
- 22:37Crossplane providers
- 23:19Performance improvements
- 24:03Vendor partnerships
- 24:45Embracing failure
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