Survival kit for CERN's organic webscape: Kubernetes and a community of Makers

How can we turn a "chore" into a community of makers, in a scientific Organization that doesn't enforce strict standards? Drupal has a long history at CERN. Site builders of >1k unique websites take advantaged of a highly automated, but bespoke infrastructure, that manages website lifecycle: provisioning, updates, backups, cloning, deleting. Relying on direct support through tickets worked, until Drupal 7 migrations overloaded the support lines, while engineers constantly come and go, taking know-how with them. Technical debt started weighing us down.
Does this sound familiar?

To overcome these challenges, we overhauled both the technical and the social aspects of the service. We built a new, cloud-native infrastructure on Kubernetes and a standard "CERN Drupal Distribution", fully open source and available. Onboarding newcomers becomes simpler thanks to the standard technologies. Patiently we also grew a Drupal community at CERN that brought site builders together to absorb knowledge in a social network and rely less on "the expert".

At DrupalCon we'll share with you our journey through these problems and our responses, describing them in details. We hope to give you both a reference frame and concrete solutions.