Using Platform Engineering to simplify the developer experience - part one

John Lewis, a major UK retailer, was struggling with its monolithic e-commerce platform in 2017, which led to slow releases and excessive manual testing. To drive transformation, the company worked with Google Cloud to modernize its e-commerce operations using Google Kubernetes Engine. The team adopted a platform engineering approach, creating many product teams that built their own microservices to replace the legacy commerce engine. The John Lewis Digital Platform was born, empowering development teams to go to market fast with full ownership of their own business services. The team's motto was "You Build It. You Run It. You Own It," which enabled decentralization of development and operational responsibilities and allowed the team to scale. To achieve this, John Lewis needed to adopt a multi-tenant architecture, allowing each owning team to work independently without risk to others. The platform team gave teams a greater degree of freedom, positioning themselves to enable many independent teams. The company adopted a "paved road" approach, making it easier for teams to work with Kubernetes and reducing the complexity that the platform team had to work with. This approach allowed teams to prototype, build, and operate their workloads without dependency on others, enabling scale. The platform team also adopted a "dusty path" and "crazy paving" approach, allowing teams to experiment with new features and accommodate wild experimentation.