Every team says they "do DevOps" - but saying it and living it are very different things. This talk is a real-world case study of walking into a fragmented engineering setup where DevOps was a job title, not a practice, and transforming it into a proper platform engineering function. I'll cover what we actually found on the ground - siloed teams, manual deployments, tribal knowledge, and the classic "it works on my machine" culture - and the practical steps we took to fix it. From consolidating tooling and building golden paths to changing how teams think about ownership, this is the honest, sometimes painful story of what it actually takes to go from DevOps theatre to real engineering excellence. No theory, no utopian architectures - just what worked, what didn't, and what I'd do differently next time.

Short Bio: Mo Abukar is a Principal Platform/DevOps Engineer, Co-Founder of CoderCo, and a platform engineering consultant who helps startups and scale-ups review their infrastructure, optimise costs, and build scalable platforms. With 7+ years of experience, Mo specialises in cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, and internal developer platforms. He's taught DevOps and platform engineering to over 5,000 students worldwide, maintains open-source projects with nearly 1,000 GitHub followers, and regularly shares insights with his 80K+ LinkedIn community. Mo is a CNCF contributor who believes the best infrastructure is the kind developers actually want to use.

Mo Abukar is a Principal Platform/DevOps Engineer, Co-Founder of CoderCo, and a platform engineering consultant who helps startups and scale-ups review their infrastructure, optimise costs, and build scalable platforms. With 7+ years of experience, Mo specialises in cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, and internal developer platforms. He's taught DevOps and platform engineering to over 5,000 students worldwide, maintains open-source projects with nearly 1,000 GitHub followers, and regularly shares insights with his 80K+ LinkedIn community. Mo is a CNCF contributor who believes the best infrastructure is the kind developers actually want to use.