KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024

Reddit’s approach to infrastructure management has grown organically over time, adapted to solve tactical, near term problems. We have now reached a point where the only way to scale infrastructure capabilities to a growing engineering organization is through platform abstractions offering self-service management of standardized infrastructure patterns. Beginning in 2021, a concerted effort was made to reimagine infrastructure as an internal platform that empowers both application and infrastructure engineers to build impactful and maintainable systems. We present a case study of Reddit’s ongoing journey in evolving its infrastructure management practices from inefficient, human-in-the-loop processes to efficient, self-service interfaces. By treating Kubernetes as a universal control plane and extending it with custom control processes fronted by well-designed interfaces, we are moving the organization towards this vision. This will cover the the many trade-offs and lessons learnt.