Building a 5* Kubernetes Hotel - Dean Fuller & Rachael Wonnacott
Dean Fuller, Rachael Wonnacott
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 · Session
In "Building a 5\* Kubernetes Hotel," Dean Fuller, Lead of Developer Platform Engineering, and Rachael Wonnacott, Technical Product Owner for the Kubernetes platform at Fidelity International, delve into their organization's ambitious journey to revolutionize its internal developer experience. The talk outlines Fidelity's evolution from a "cloud house" model, where application teams managed their own infrastructure, to a "Kubernetes hotel" paradigm, where a centralized platform team provides a fully managed, opinionated Kubernetes environment. This shift aims to empower Fidelity's 2,500 developers to focus solely on delivering business value, abstracting away the complexities of underlying infrastructure.
AI review
This talk from Fidelity International provides a brutally honest and detailed account of their journey from a decentralized "cloud house" model to a centralized, managed "Kubernetes hotel." The speakers, directly involved in the platform's development, offer invaluable insights into the operational realities, cognitive load shifts, and critical trade-offs faced when building an enterprise-grade platform in a highly regulated environment. Their candor about the "motel" phase of their MVP and the challenges of integrating open-source components offers practical lessons for any large…