Panos Tsilopoulos

This session explores Nike’s pragmatic approach to platform composability—building loosely coupled capabilities for incremental adoption without disruptive migrations. It introduces an economic model for build-vs-buy decisions, highlighting hidden costs of vendor sprawl like context switching and integration maintenance. The talk details the creation of NO-OP (Nike’s Open-source Observability Platform), which replaced six monitoring tools, cut total cost of ownership by 4x, improved uNPS by 30%, and saved $15M annually. Key strategies include leveraging OpenTelemetry as a universal language, enabling self-service onboarding (weeks to hours), and implementing team-level cost transparency. Attendees will learn a quantifiable cost framework, composable architecture patterns for gradual migration, and battle-proven tactics that drove 100% platform adoption in 18 months—plus lessons learned from cultural resistance, bottling high-heat events plus challenges related to working with and on open-source.