Moving hundreds of build servers without stopping the games
Our platform engineer is helping Electronic Arts migrate its build infrastructure to a new virtualisation platform, one automated step at a time.
Behind every game at Electronic Arts is a machine room most players never think about: build servers that compile, package and test enormous codebases around the clock. When that infrastructure works, it's invisible. When it doesn't, whole studios wait. The scale is hard to picture: EA's build teams describe validating hundreds of code changes every day, across a global farm of on-premise and cloud machines.
Our consultant is part of a large-scale migration moving those build servers onto a new virtualisation platform, involving hundreds of virtual machines. The work spans the full journey: building Terraform infrastructure to support the move, gathering and analysing infrastructure data to plan it, and developing automations that make each step repeatable and safe. When the migration itself runs, our consultant will be part of the team carrying it out.
Migrations at this scale are won or lost in the preparation. Everything that can be expressed as code, measured or automated should be, so that the hundredth machine moves as reliably as the first. That's the same mindset that makes modern teams ready for AI: codified infrastructure, clean data and automation are the foundation agents build on.
The experience behind it runs deep. Our consultant started in IT in 2007 and has worked at companies such as Amazon Web Services, King and Toca Boca.
“Consulting lets you fully diversify your skills. You work on vastly different projects for different customers, keep improving, and carry what you learn to the next one.”
