Phil WhelanLeading The Platform Team @ Bench
This post was originally published on Bench’s engineering blog while I was a Principal Engineer at Bench.
Photo by Clément H on Unsplash
For just over two years I have lead the Platform Team at Bench. The work we’ve done is definitely a highlight of my career. This includes…
- Building our own Kubernetes, understanding its nuts and bolts and migrating all our services over from AWS ElasticBeanstalk
- Chaos testing, every Wednesday (for a while)
- Rolling out ephemeral database credentials with HashiCorp Vault for all our apps and engineers and talking about it HashiConf
- Migrating our infrastructure and services to Amazon MQ and being a featured customer on the Amazon MQ homepage
- Terraforming all the things!
- Rebuilding our Jenkins infrastructure to be… well.. rebuildable
- Rolling out Dex for Kubernetes authentication with Okta via OIDC
Next up
This quarter we’re moving all our Kubernetes clusters over to AWS EKS, instead of continuing to roll our own with Kops. 49 services across 3 environments will seamlessly migrate across to EKS, just as they did when we moved off of ElasticBeanstalk without downtime.
Passing the reins
My role with the Platform Team has changed as I have morphed into my new role as Principal Software Engineer (still at Bench). Right now I’m still guiding the work, but I’m looking for someone else to take the reins and work with me to keep pushing infrastructure at Bench forward as I become more involved across the wider Engineering team. There’s so much more to do!