Keith Davidson, Director of Group TV Distribution Platforms, Sky - leads the department that develops and operates the TV distribution platforms for Sky Group, these platforms cover Live Streaming, Content Process Live and VOD, Data Analytics, Advertising, Content Protection and is responsible for Group Reliability Engineering. His team has over 700 people, across London, Leeds, Lisbon and Scotland, comprising a wide range of roles such as architects, analysts, developers, streaming engineers, reliability engineers, data scientists and program managers. Sky Group supports the international expansion of Sky services and leading entertainment brands such as Sky+, Sky Go, Sky Q, Sky Kids, Sky Store, Sky Ticket, NOW TV, Sky News and Sky Sports.

1. Growing a Great Engineering Culture with Apache Kafka
Keith Davidson Director of TV Platforms

2. 56
We are what we repeatedly do.
Aristotle
“We shape our tools, and then our tools
shape us”

3. Conway’s Law
Our systems are a reflection of how we
collaboratecollaborate
“Organizations which design systems are
constrained to produce designs which are
copies of the communication structures of
these organizations”

4. Data Ownership
Cultural singularity: introducing Kafka to fix Sky.com

5. The Ecosystem Effect
Spreading good engineering throughout the organisation.
https://github.com/
sky-uk/kafka-
configurator
https://github.com/sk
y-uk/kafka-topic-
loader
https://github.com/s
ky-uk/kafka-
message-scheduler
[soon][soon]
YOU BUILD IT, YOU RUN IT
YOU FACE IT, YOU FIX IT
WE SHARE IT!

6. Patterns and Industrialisation: Believe in Better
Merging Kafka clusters, a cultural statement.

7. 61
Where This Has Brought Us So Far
Believe in Better.
XXXXX
Millions
XXXXX
Concurrent
users
99.999%
Availability
>5000
Deployments/
year
>500
200
Linear channels
100’s of
Billions
Minutes/yea
r
Unique services
supported
Minutes/year

8. A single
ecosystem
Relentless
focus
on data
Spirit of
collaboration
Sense of
ownership

9. Thank You