From Duct Tape to Declarative - Playtika's Platform Overhaul at Unicorn Scale

Learn how Playtika transformed their chaotic gaming platform infrastructure from fragmented Ansible scripts and imperative Jenkins pipelines into a modern, declarative CNCF-driven stack in this 25-minute conference talk. Discover the technical and cultural challenges faced when rapid growth outpaced platform capabilities, resulting in days-long environment provisioning, inconsistent automation practices, and fragile systems that teams were afraid to touch. Explore the comprehensive modernization strategy that replaced the existing mess with declarative Kubernetes clusters using ClusterAPI, GitOps deployments through FluxCD, and infrastructure management via Crossplane, while consolidating multiple internal portals into a single Backstage-powered developer portal. Understand how this transformation reduced provisioning time from days to under an hour, eliminated ticket-based operations in favor of self-service capabilities, and achieved developer efficiency at unicorn scale using entirely open-source solutions. Gain insights into the cultural shift required to move from fragmented, team-specific automation approaches to standardized practices that enable true scalability, making this essential viewing for platform engineers dealing with similar infrastructure challenges in high-growth environments.