2026-05-06 –, Inspiration A/B
Platform teams are often great at keeping systems running, but still struggle to deliver value quickly. This talk shares how platform engineering decisions directly shaped delivery speed, reliability, and confidence, and how removing hidden bottlenecks helped value reach users faster.
Platform teams are often successful at stability, but delivery speed is where value becomes visible. In this talk, I’ll share how our platform engineering team identified and removed the hidden bottlenecks that slowed delivery, transforming deployments from a slow, manual process into a fast, reliable, and confidence-driven workflow.
You’ll hear a real-world story of how we moved from imperative, CLI-driven deployments to a declarative, GitOps-based platform, reduced rollout times from ~20 minutes to just a few minutes, and improved trust in change across teams. Along the way, I’ll cover what worked, what took longer than expected, and what didn’t improve at all.
This talk is for anyone building or operating internal platforms who wants to understand how platform decisions affect real-world value delivery, not just uptime.
Ajo Augustine is a Senior Platform Engineer at the Center for Translational Data Science (CTDS), University of Chicago. He works on Kubernetes-based platforms supporting large-scale research workloads. His focus is on platform engineering, GitOps, and infrastructure automation to improve delivery speed and reliability.