People-First Path to Cell-Based Architecture

Discover how the University of Edinburgh transformed its 400-year-old institution with 60,000 students and staff from a monolithic ESB to a decentralized, Kubernetes-native architecture in this 22-minute conference talk. Learn about the people-first approach that Martin Jones from the University of Edinburgh and Asanka Abeysinghe from WSO2 used to successfully implement cell-based architecture while maintaining stakeholder engagement throughout the transformation process. Explore how the university's API-first mandate revealed governance bottlenecks, release cadence issues, and team autonomy challenges, and understand the solution of grouping related microservices, APIs, and policies into self-contained cells deployed on Kubernetes. Examine the practical results including reduced provisioning time from weeks to minutes, streamlined incident investigation through cell and artifact level logging, and simplified code deployment processes. Gain insights into the collaborative approach that involved both business users and technical staff, building engagement and trust while developing lightweight playbooks that created a replicable blueprint for implementing cell-based architecture in large, federated organizations, emphasizing the importance of starting with people rather than platforms.