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 21-minute conference talk. Discover the technical and cultural challenges faced when rapid growth outpaced platform capabilities, causing environment provisioning to take days and creating a fragile system where teams avoided touching critical components. Explore the comprehensive modernization strategy that replaced scattered automation approaches with standardized solutions including Kubernetes clusters managed by ClusterAPI, GitOps deployments using FluxCD, and infrastructure management through Crossplane. Understand how consolidating multiple internal portals into a single Backstage-powered developer portal improved efficiency and reduced onboarding complexity. Examine the cultural transformation from ticket-based operations to self-service capabilities, resulting in provisioning times dropping from days to under an hour using open-source tools. Gain insights into how standardization and declarative infrastructure management can scale gaming platforms while maintaining developer productivity and system reliability.