#052 - The "Short Long Path": Mastering Abstraction, Culture, and Kubernetes Scale with Shemer Mashiach (Playtika) & Scott Rosenberg (TeraSky)
Wed Feb 04 2026
In this episode, Itiel joins forces with Shemer, Director of Platform Solutions at the gaming giant Playtika, and Scott Rosenberg, Lead Architect at TeraSky, to discuss the realities of platform engineering at a massive scale. The trio dissects Playtika’s multi-year journey from a legacy, homegrown Kubespray infrastructure to a modern, holistic platform built on Spectro Cloud, all while running strictly on-premise to support 25+ games and high-volume traffic.
The conversation focuses heavily on the art of abstraction, specifically how using tools like Crossplane allowed Playtika to modernize their backend without disrupting the developer experience - a philosophy Scott describes as taking the "long path" to ultimately achieve the "short path" of seamless adoption.
Learn about the challenges of overcoming "people and culture" hurdles during migration, the concept of using Kubernetes as a control plane rather than just a runtime, and realistic predictions for the role of AI agents and RAG in future DevOps workflows.
Follow Scott and Shemer on LinkedIn.
More
In this episode, Itiel joins forces with Shemer, Director of Platform Solutions at the gaming giant Playtika, and Scott Rosenberg, Lead Architect at TeraSky, to discuss the realities of platform engineering at a massive scale. The trio dissects Playtika’s multi-year journey from a legacy, homegrown Kubespray infrastructure to a modern, holistic platform built on Spectro Cloud, all while running strictly on-premise to support 25+ games and high-volume traffic. The conversation focuses heavily on the art of abstraction, specifically how using tools like Crossplane allowed Playtika to modernize their backend without disrupting the developer experience - a philosophy Scott describes as taking the "long path" to ultimately achieve the "short path" of seamless adoption. Learn about the challenges of overcoming "people and culture" hurdles during migration, the concept of using Kubernetes as a control plane rather than just a runtime, and realistic predictions for the role of AI agents and RAG in future DevOps workflows. Follow Scott and Shemer on LinkedIn.