The Accidental Platform Team: Kubernetes Operators at Swisscom
Fabian Schulz
Lea Brühwiler
10:15 - 11:00
Pavillon
What happens when Operators outgrow their original scope? At Swisscom, our Operators for network automation are now used both by the 5G Core team to automate the mobile core and by our platform team to power Kubernetes-as-a-Service. Suddenly, we found ourselves running “Operators as a Service,” sitting between networking and application teams, defining boundaries, and scaling a model that spans domains. In this session, we’ll share what worked, and what didn’t. How we convinced teams with little kubernetes know-how to adopt our Operators, designing interfaces that hide complexity, and keeping reliability high without slowing teams down. Most importantly, we’ll highlight why staying close to our users, understanding their needs, workflows, and limits, was critical to building Operators they actually wanted to use.