HSBCs Google Cloud: How Two Engineers Beat A 12x Growth Plan
Why This Matters If You Run a Serious Business Cloud projects often drift, budgets balloon, and timelines stretch. This one did not. Two engineers walked into HSBC and built what is possibly the largest Google Cloud platform on the planet, then beat an 18 month growth plan by 12x. If you are building systems in the cloud, or leading a technology team in a £5M to £20M firm, this is worth three minutes. You stop firefighting infrastructure problems and start building on stable, secure patterns Your developers move faster without opening security holes to the world You scale 12x faster than your original plan without chaos or costly rework Your platform becomes self service, cutting bottlenecks and delays across teams You build trust with stakeholders through consistent, repeatable delivery Key Ideas In This Video Most cloud projects drift. Requirements change, teams move slowly, and infrastructure becomes a patchwork of quick fixes. HSBC needed something different: a self service platform that let developers build fast, but with guardrails. The Platform Engineering Approach The solution was not ad hoc DevOps. It was platform engineering done properly. The team built a self service system with GitOps at its core. Developers could push secure