Abstract
Platform teams frequently inherit systems that were never architected for their current scale, yet are so foundational that downtime can halt the business. Operating on these fragile foundations, teams face the daunting challenge of continuously shipping new features while scaling infrastructure significantly. Continuous delivery can feel risky in such critical scenarios—but avoiding it can stall progress, frustrate internal customers, and trap teams in endless rewrites that never materialize.
Drawing from his experiences leading foundational platform teams at AWS EC2 and Datadog, Ian Nowland will share practical strategies to safely implement continuous delivery, balancing reliability with innovation. Attendees will learn how to scale confidently, enhance developer productivity, and sustainably improve their platforms—even under immense pressure.
Speaker
Ian Nowland
CEO @Junction Labs, Author of O'Reilly's Platform Engineering, Previously SVP Core Engineering at Datadog and Leader of AWS Nitro
Ian Nowland is the CEO and co-founder of Junction Labs, and co-author of O'Reilly’s Platform Engineering. With 25 years in software, Ian previously served as SVP of Core Engineering at Datadog during its hypergrowth phase, and spent eight formative years at AWS (2008–2016), where he led the creation and development of EMR and AWS Nitro, EC2’s virtualization platform.
