Moving a ferry and logistics business to cloud-native

Context

DFDS runs ferry and logistics operations across Europe, and its software estate had grown the way most do: large applications, slow releases, and infrastructure that a central team had to touch for every change. The business wanted to ship faster without each team waiting on another. I was brought in to build the developer-platform capability that would make that possible and to lead the move to cloud-native across the engineering organisation.

What I did

I started the Developer & Platform Experience department at three people and grew it to twenty over three years, hiring for platform engineering rather than project delivery. The team built an internal developer platform with self-service and golden paths so product teams could provision, deploy, and run their own services without a ticket queue. I drew on Team Topologies and treated the platform as a product with its own roadmap and internal users.

On top of that platform we ran the migration to microservices on Kubernetes, built from zero. Over three years the estate grew past 500 services in production, and around 200 engineers moved to building and operating for the cloud. The goal of the composable-architecture programme was to make it easy for every team to be compliant with the DFDS IT and digital strategy, and to transfer the knowledge teams needed to build and run their own applications for the cloud in an automated way. I set the architectural direction, the operational standards teams had to meet to run in production, and the support model that kept the platform reliable as adoption climbed, much of it on an event-driven architecture built around Kafka. I also oversaw cloud operations with a focus on security and cost-efficiency as the estate grew.

I led three teams inside the department: API development and data models, which built the path to take machine-learning models into production for logistics with the AI/ML department; Development Excellence; and Autonomous Ports building on .NET Core. During this period I was selected for the DFDS Horizon management talent programme out of 200 nominees.

Outcome

DFDS shifted from a central infrastructure bottleneck to teams that own their services end to end on a shared platform. The 500+ microservices on Kubernetes and the roughly 200 engineers building cloud-native are the visible measure of that change, but the durable result is the operating model underneath it: a platform team that runs its work as a product, and product teams that ship on their own cadence. That foundation is what later cloud and data work at DFDS built on.