Repost from 2020 with permission
Tesco is well advanced on its journey to a new strategic Cloud platform. We caught up with Head of Cloud Platforms, Nathan Luxford to talk about the Cloud, Kubernetes, and his team’s work in creating the best possible environment for the whole tech team at Tesco.
Nathan, could you start by explaining the Cloud Platform team’s role?
We live in the infrastructure function – and act as our internal service provider to enable tech teams and the business to consume best-of-breed cloud services and tooling. For us, it is about keeping the developer experience at the heart of what we do – we want to get the best developers in and give them the best tools and support.
What are the key platforms and tools you use?
Microsoft Azure Cloud is our focus, and we have a large consumption in Amazon Web Services as well. We also run several development tool platforms, such as GitHub and others we host internally. The dev tooling team are using GitHub Enterprise, Chef Enterprise, Sonar Cube for code scanning, Nexus for repositories. It’s all best of breed.
And what’s the size and structure of the team?
It’s around 25 people, based across London, Welwyn Garden City, Poland, and our Bangalore tech hub – it’s a large team. You’ve got a mix of proper coders and more programme focused roles. It takes a mix of skillsets to keep all the platforms running, especially when you are working with partners, from Microsoft down to small suppliers.
Can you tell us about the sort of challenges your team face?
I think no-one realises how big Tesco is until they join. Tesco Technology is like a 3000-employee business in its own right. If you took that as its own business, it would be a large software company. There are lots of different teams in different geographies.
As an internal service provider, it’s almost like working with 300 different companies. The tech teams have a lot of freedom to do things in their way. We have to provide the infrastructure to support the pace of innovation. It is so rapid, it’s amazing. Until you join you wouldn’t believe a business so big could move so fast. You can be working on something and see the actual difference when you go into a Tesco store a week later.
Could you give us an example of what this rapid innovation?
The amount of innovation in response to the Covid lockdown was incredible. My team worked with an engineering team to stand up a brand new platform to help increase capacity. We literally did it from idea to live in a week. There are few places in the world where you could go into production in that time. It was amazing to be part of that.
I worked for an ISP before, so we were kind of in the background. The big difference here is that you see the fruits of your labour – it has a material impact.
And in terms of engineering new tools for engineers?
It’s amazing for us to get so involved in co-tooling and co-engineering. Once live, Tesco will be one of the biggest consumers of Kubernetes on Azure Cloud. The co-engineering we have done on that with Microsoft and our own engineering teams has been incredible. It’s massively rewarding to see this come to life in a business as big as Tesco.
What has the work on Kubernetes involved?
We run an inner sourcing community within Tesco and were early adopters of Kubernetes. We’ve been running it in some form for three to four years. It’s key to our pipeline of work and has been the go-to platform for driving our hybrid cloud agnostic strategy.
Now that we are moving to a strategic cloud platform, we are working closely with the Azure Kubernetes team to ensure the new platform will support the workload. Primarily, we are building a shared community of platforms. Tesco engineering teams and my team have co-developed the infrastructure as code, to deal with the demands of our developer community. It allows us to go into production much faster. Kubernetes is central to that.
What else in the pipeline is exciting you?
We are continuing our Cloud adoption. This includes further investment in our inner sourcing community. We’re driving further adoption of terraforming infrastructure as code across all or our clouds.
Another priority is increasing our dev tooling portfolio and looking into 3rd party tooling, and things like service mesh, Shared Secrets and other dashboarding tools. We are also looking at pipeline technologies like Jenkins and Azure pipelines. And we’re building a thin ops practice to manage our multi-cloud spend. There is lots of cool stuff going on.
You talked earlier about giving developers the best possible experience? What do you mean by that?
This comes down to our internal service provider mindset. We treat colleagues as customers and build them things they want to use. Unlike many companies, we avoid dictating what people must do or use. Tesco is a good place to come as a technologist, as we don’t have that kind of culture. We know if you want top talent, you have to give them the tools they want. You have to give them things that don’t add friction.
So how would you sum up the career opportunity at Tesco?
This is one the biggest hidden gems in IT. It’s a massively rewarding experience to work with cutting-edge technology on this scale. You get to play with all the toys. Join us if you like fixing complex problems and making a visible impact in a tech community and a wider business.