This document discusses 10 common fallacies in platform engineering. It begins by introducing the speaker and topic, which are 10 fallacies seen in platform engineering and how to mitigate them. Some of the fallacies discussed include prioritizing the wrong procedures, relying only on visualizations, trying to replace all tools at once, providing too much freedom without constraints, and trying to compete directly with large cloud providers. The goal of platform engineering is to standardize processes and reduce cognitive load on developers and operations teams.

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10 fallacies in platform
engineering
CNCF online event, Sept 1st 2022
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Kaspar
➔ CEO of Humanitec, a Platform Orchestrator
➔ @kaspar_official
➔ kaspar@humanitec.com
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In this talk
➔ Platforming, what are we talking about?
➔ The top 10 fallacies and how to mitigate them
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4. The problem
Teams waste 25% of their time
operating apps as complexity
increases
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More services and
infrastructure resources
per app than 2010.
25X
More specialist tools in
the toolchain to meet
scale.
5X
Evolving global
environment drives
demand & complexity.

5. We’re trying to control this chaos with manual work and
scripts
Sample App
Tool Infrastructure
Action
Jenkins
AWS Cluster
GCP Cluster
Artifactory
GithubActions
Terraform Crossplane
cloudsql
RDS
Redis
Microservice
Payments
ReactFronted
API
Cloudflare
Ingress Vault
Gateway
User Auth
User Auth
Deploy
Add service
Debug
Roll back
Maintain
Spin up env
Request resource
Filestorage Onboard team
Stream Logs
Datadog
Snyk
Rabbitmq
MariaDB
Infra Orchestration
Env Management
Deploy Pipeline
Istio
Developers wait,
Ops drowns.
Complex Operative Environment of App
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Application developers
➔ Reduce cognitive load
➔ Without abstracting
➔ Without breaking the
workflow
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Platform/SRE
➔ Standardization by
design
➔ Reduced ticket ops
➔ Focus
Why platform engineering?

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Internal Developer Platforms - the sum of many
components that form golden paths for developers

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As we start platforming the digital world we fall for many
fallacies. Here are the most common ones I see.
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#1 The prioritization fallacy
Procedure Frequency (%of
deployments)
Dev time in hours
(including waiting
and errors)
Ops time in hours
(including waiting
and errors)
Adding env variable 5%* 1h* 1h*
Add services and dependencies 1%* 16h* 8h*
Refactoring 0,18%* 40h* 8h*
Changing resources/ Adding resources 0,18%* 8h* 24h*
Waiting due to blocked environment 0,5%* 15h* 0h*
Spinning up environment 0,33%* 24h* 24h*
Onboarding developers 3%* 80h* 16h*

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#2 The visualization fallacy

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#3 The “wars you cannot win” fallacy
“Let’s move everything away
from Jenkins and into Azure
DevOps”

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#4 The “everything and everybody at once” fallacy

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#5 The “the new setup isn’t better” fallacy

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#6 The abstraction fallacy

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#7 The “loudest voice” fallacy

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#8 The freedom fallacy

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#9 The “Google/Facebook/Netflix” fallacy

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#10 The “compete with AWS” fallacy

19. Check the Platform Engineering
community:
● Platformengineering.org
● Platform Engineering Slack
● Platform Engineering Meetups
● PlatformCon