Infrastructure at Scale, Automation Culture, and What’s Missing in African Tech

Michael Uanikehi leads cloud and DevOps engineering at the London Stock Exchange Group, where he designs, deploys, and optimises systems used by groups working in the financial, health tech, and logistics fields.

Thanks to his AWS, Microsoft, and HashiCorp certifications, he has created infrastructure serving many users and safeguarding private data across borders.

In this interview, he discusses the tension between speed and security, and why he believes people are a blind spot in the world of automation and the weaknesses in African startups’ infrastructure

What are the main aspects of good infrastructure in the current world of cloud-native applications?

It’s observable, resilient, and reproducible. These days, infrastructure isn’t just virtual machines or networks because it covers pipelines, policies, and guardrails that are written as code.

To scale it well, you need to ensure that version control is used. Strong infrastructure takes out the surprises and ensures your system has as few risks as possible.

A great number of teams refer to CI/CD but do deployments on their local laptops. What is your opinion on why such a gap exists?

Simply put, it is because culture is not something that shows up in a package. Although GitHub Actions or ArgoCD are powerful, they can’t change an organizational thinking.

Many organisations believe too little in how much effort is truly needed to create an automation culture and trust among team members. CI/CD goes beyond scripts; it shows how you can act, fail, and recover quickly without compromising reliability.

What is the toughest project in terms of technical details that you’ve worked on lately?

This includes moving everything from IBM UrbanCode to GitHub Actions in a setup with multiple regions.

The code was changed to improve pipelines; we built reusable workflows, adopted Vault to handle secret rotation, and linked everything with a Slack-based system for approval. The complexity wasn’t just in the tools but in the orchestration, stakeholder buy-in, and live cutover.

You are open about the importance of digital access in Nigeria. Why does this issue mean so much to you?

Because I’ve gone through the same experiences. I started by working at internet cafés in Benin, and now I lead DevOps strategy in Manchester.

The right abilities can be found everywhere, but not all people have equal chances. We can’t keep excluding entire populations from digital literacy because we’re slow to deploy broadband, devices, or mentors.

The next big engineer might just be offline.

What do you wish more African startups got right about their tech stack?

Two things. Observability from day one and infrastructure as a shared responsibility. You can’t scale a platform you don’t understand in real-time. And DevOps is not one person, but it’s a culture across dev, security, and ops.

If your stack only works when one engineer is awake, you don’t have a system; you have a bottleneck.

Bio:

Michael Uanikehi is a Senior DevOps Engineer at the London Stock Exchange Group, an AWS Community Builder, and an active open-source contributor.

He has led and delivered critical financial engineering projects and enhanced tools like AWS Lambda Powertools, the Terraform AWS Provider, amazon-efs-utils, Kubernetes and numerous other OSS initiatives.

Michael shares his expertise through Dev.to deep dives, conference talks, and free mentorship workshops, championing inclusive DevOps practices that empower developers to build resilient, secure, and efficient cloud systems.

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