Reducing Toil in Infra: A Real-World Migration and Automation Journey

At Visa, I typically work on the full-stack side, but over the past few months, I shifted to infrastructure. I led a migration from Bitbucket to GitHub Enterprise across two data centers. Then, I tackled a MySQL upgrade on eight servers, but a version change taught me the hard lesson of reviewing upgrades manually, not just relying on tools. I also configured Docker, NGINX, and migrated from NFS to XFS to improve performance. But one big challenge we’re still tackling is our deployment process: we’re still on Docker Swarm, which is manual and outdated. I started automating parts of it, creating a script to reduce manual steps, but we’re not fully there yet.

Now, we’re on a journey to migrate everything to Kubernetes, moving us toward a modern, scalable, automated deployment pipeline. This talk is about how these incremental steps, from manual toil to automation, are helping us build a more resilient DevOps culture.