Leading the kubernation: a journey towards a migration story

Katerina Nikolaou shares her journey of leading a complex migration from Jenkins to GitHub Actions and Kubernetes, highlighting the technical challenges, leadership growth, and team collaboration that made the transformation a success.

In this inspiring talk, Katerina Nikolaou, recounts her experience leading a major infrastructure transformation project at Allwyn, where she transitioned from a software engineering in test role, to leading the migration of outdated CI/CD systems to a modern setup using GitHub Actions and Kubernetes. 

When her team lead moved on during a critical phase, Katerina stepped up, facing imposter syndrome but ultimately embracing the challenge. Her team was tasked with redesigning pipelines, creating reusable workflows, upgrading 44 legacy libraries, and ensuring smooth integration and deployment processes across multiple services. The migration involved deep collaboration across development, platform, and leadership teams, as well as the implementation of scalable, automated, and efficient systems.

Beyond the technical achievements, Katerina emphasises the importance of ownership, adaptability and trust within a team. By overcoming hurdles like deprecated tools, outdated code, and tight deadlines, she and her team successfully delivered a fully modernized infrastructure that supports both Docker and Maven packages, leverages GitHub registry, and deploys to Kubernetes clusters on AWS. 

Her story not only showcases the power of technical leadership but also serves as a testament to continuous learning, growth under pressure, and the importance of strong team dynamics in driving innovation forward.