I got good at infrastructure because it kept getting in the way. This talk is about what happens when you get tired of watching the same problem repeat. From PLCs with 6 month wait times to founders burning £10 million on backend plumbing instead of building their product. How getting out of the way, and staying invisible, helps everyone move faster. And how that new normal becomes shockingly obvious the moment it breaks.
I'll cover the architectural decisions behind Anythink: tenanted Kubernetes from day one, CI/CD as a product feature rather than internal tooling, and Landscaper, the in-house tool we built to handle tenant lifecycle, feature flagging, JWT and cross-tenant permissions, and act as the glue between Terraform, Kubernetes, and our entire infrastructure. Nothing off the shelf did what we needed, so we built it.
Two real deployments: a sports psychology app and an international music distributor that started on Microsoft Access and is now running on modern cloud infrastructure without even knowing it's doing DevOps.
The goal was always invisible infrastructure. Give developers the control they need, safe defaults, and nothing getting in the way of the product. This is how we got there.
Chris Addams is the founder of Anythink. He didn't plan to stay in tech. After studying computer science he did transformation work with charities and businesses, then the industry pulled him back in. Almost twenty years later he'd led the technical programme for the Amazon Prime Video Europe launch, introduced DevOps to Tesco, helped kick off the DAZN sports streaming platform, and delivered 4,000% productivity improvements for a major UK internet service provider.
In 2015 he started independent work, including running DevOps transformation programmes with Contino. Doing maturity assessments across dozens of organisations, he kept seeing the same thing: from PLCs to scale-ups to startups, every business trying to solve the same infrastructure problems, over and over.
He built Anythink to fix that. Solo founder, small team, no venture backing. Infrastructure that works best when nobody notices it; built by someone who wasn't supposed to be here in the first place.
