A history of the ITV Common Platform for DevOps

When many of you hear ITV, you likely think of its dynastic soaps and family-friendly Saturday-night entertainment. However, to us, ITV represents so much more.For a decade, we have been a long-standing partner to the UKs largest commercial broadcaster and streamer, ITV to support their recruitment endeavors. Our collaboration has enabled us to integrate over 50 talented individuals into their team to work on its common platform which attracts 10s of millions of users that scales to 20,000 requests per second to its clients around the world..

Our partnership has seen the cloud platform evolve into three distinct versions. From its first launch in 2014, through to its third (CP3) in 2023, the global platform now offers key applications such as ITV Player, Britbox and ITV X, a system which pays the iconic duo, Ant & Dec.

During our 10-year partnership, the DevOps Exchange has had the pleasure of hosting ITV on its stage five times. These insightful talks from Tom Clark, Tom Haynes and Cameron Adams have meticulously documented ITV's remarkable journey, highlighting the evolution of its platform over the years.

Unfortunately, only 3 of the 5 talks from the DevOps Exchange events were recorded, and we have listed them below to showcase ITV's journey from v1 back in 2018 to v3 in 2024, including all of the obstacles and challenges they faced along the way.



For ITV's first ever talk at the DevOps Exchange, welcomed Cameron Adams, Platform Engineer at ITV who shared with us ITV's journey of how they used Docker and Selenium to take their build pipeline from 4 hours to 40 minutes at ITV.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1JbNbpTcu25Hdi2q_Pw9na7Sa9FOSP0oUxexwvJE8PzA/edit#slide=id.p

Back in 2018, we then welcomed (for the first time) to the stage Tom Clark, Head of Common Platform at ITV. In this talk, Tom spoke about how ITV retain their high performers by keeping teams happy.

Tom shared his theory that high performance is an emergent property of three factors: environment, people and leadership. If we blend these correctly and high performance follows as a side-effect… almost like magic.
 

Tom then joined us again 2019 to talk us through v2 of the Common Platform. Tom explained that back in 2015, ITV thought they had built the last hosting platform they'd ever need. However fast-forward to 2019 and they replaced half of it. In this frank retrospective, Tom shared what they learnt from v1 and what steps they took to ensure that v2 will be last last hosting platform they'll ever need..or so they thought.



Most recently, Tom Haynes, Platform Engineer at ITV joined us to share the journey of the Common Platform so far. From  from v1 back in 2018, to v3 in 2024, highlighting all of the obstacles and challenges they faced along the way.

Tom shared the aims, rollout and achievements of CPv3, with its focus on balancing freedom with control - enabling effective developer self service without sacrificing best practice, reliability, security and operational excellence.

A tremendous partnership and one that we aim to continue for many years. If you are currently looking for permanent talent to build brilliant teams or a contract specialist to close a resource gap, we can find the right person for your business.

Please get in touch with a member of then team today, we would love to help.