Why we skipped SRE and switched to Platform Engineering | Electrolux

[intro jingle] [Ramil:] Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming. My name is Ramil, I'm a Senior Platform Engineer at Electrolux. It's a home appliance manufacturer. I have 15 years of experience in the industry as an automation engineer, as a software engineer, and now as a platform engineer. I joined Electrolux six years ago and was at the origins of the IoT platform development. [Gang:] I also joined Electrolux about the same time as Ramil, but as an SRE and not as a developer. I have roughly 20 years of experience in the industry, starting with development and later on switching to SRE when I joined Electrolux. Then, probably two years ago, I started to move into more about platforms. [Ramil:] Okay, so what is the IoT platform? The IoT platform connects home appliances and allows customers to control their appliances from the mobile application. Our platform provides not only simple appliance control but also other customer-oriented features, like assisted cooking. It's IoT with an assistant that takes a link from the internet with a recipe, analyses it, and selects the most optimal cooking settings for you. [Gang:] To really support a good consumer experience, we actually have a bit complicated setup from our backend. As you can see, probably some of you are familiar with these logos, right? You can see those cloud providers here. That's because we also have a legacy system that we have to decommission, but we cannot decommission completely. [Ramil:] When we started, we had quite a small team, only one connectivity platform, one product, eight developers, and only two SRE engineers. Gang, how did you feel at that time? [Gang:] It was very nice when I joined. It was more like a start-up. We call it our own start-up in Electronics. It's not a tech company, but we work as the same team building the cloud backend. Everything went very well, I would say, like a family. But it didn't last long. After two years, we saw different regions starting to grow their business, and more consumers began to connect their appliances to our cloud. The backend team started to ship more features, and we ran into firefighting mode. We have different regions and different business areas, and some of those stakeholders are not easy to communicate with because they're not very technical. So, every time they noticed something didn't work from their mobile app, they would come by our table and ask us, 'Is our cloud done today?' Of course, we understood that not everything is about the cloud; you also have your mobile apps running somewhere that might have issues. [Ramil:] Yes, we had plenty of issues at that moment. The problem might have been related to the appliance, cloud infrastructure, or even some service logic. We communicated a lot with SRE engineers from the development side. As Gang mentioned, several business areas developed their own mobile applications, resulting in more than 20 mobile applications. This significantly increased the complexity of the backend and IoT platform. We started delivering more features, and the number of developers significantly increased. But what about SRE Engineers, Gang? [Gang:] We didn't grow at the same rate as developers. One reason is that we had to find a way to support the business growth using some kind of engineering approach. Platform engineering fits this very well. We provide things through platforms, through code to our developers, not through training or one-on-one sessions, because that didn't scale. Once we see more issues coming, we try to improve our platform. We put more code and more things there. For developers, as long as they are using our platforms, they basically get everything for free, which removes the overhead from their side. [Ramil:] So, that's what we learned during our journey. Thank you very much. There's our LinkedIn profile. So, let's connect. [Gang:] This is also our open-source repo; if you are interested, feel free to check it out. [outro music] [music stops]