Scaling DevOps Without Scaling Ops: Our Platform Engineering Journey

Abstract

As Electrolux Group grew its IoT engineering organization from 10 to over 300 developers, our operations team stayed almost the same size. Traditional DevOps and SRE approaches quickly stopped scaling.

We initially adopted SRE practices, but found them difficult to apply consistently across many autonomous product teams. Instead of scaling processes or people, we chose to scale through a platform.

We built an Internal Developer Platform using Backstage, Terraform, and custom platform APIs to provide self-service infrastructure with opinionated defaults. Reliability, security, compliance, and cost controls were baked directly into the platform, allowing teams to move fast without deep operational expertise.

In this talk, we’ll share our journey from SRE to Platform Engineering, how we designed and evolved our Internal Developer Platform, and how it eventually became the foundation for our open-source project.