From Chaos To Control: Building ML Platform - George Markhulia & Steve Larkin, Volvo Cars
George Markhulia, Steve Larkin, Volvo Cars
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 · Session
This talk, "From Chaos To Control: Building ML Platform," presented by George Markhulia and Steve Larkin from Volvo Cars, details the journey and architecture behind Abacus, their internal Machine Learning (ML) platform. Abacus aims to empower data scientists and analysts within Volvo Cars to rapidly validate ideas, train models, and deploy them into production with minimal friction. The platform, built on a **Kubernetes** and **cloud-native stack**, addresses the common challenges of ML development in large enterprises, such as fragmentation, lack of reproducibility, and the arduous path from experimentation to production.
AI review
This talk from Volvo Cars isn't just another 'ML platform' rehash; it's a deeply technical, brutally honest account of building a production-grade, multi-tenant machine learning ecosystem from the ground up. The speakers detail the architecture, user journeys, and critical integration challenges with a level of specificity rarely seen. For any organization struggling to scale ML beyond isolated experiments, this provides an actionable, battle-tested blueprint that cuts through the marketing fluff and delivers genuine engineering insights. It’s a masterclass in platform as a product…