Building a great internal platform starts with the API

@a_bangser hachyderm.io/@abangser
Building a great internal
platform starts with the API
Abby Bangser (she/her)
https://stateofopencon.com/ #stateofopencon #soocon23 #openuk
https://hachyderm.io/@openuk

➔ The evolution leading to platform engineering
➔ Current solutions for delivering a platform
➔ Benefits of delivering your Platform as-a-Product
Starting with the what and why
of an internal platforms

Software is meant to solve user problems

But scaled, trustworthy software is complex

So we tried to reduce cognitive load:
The dev and ops model

This reduced shared ownership
but challenged delivery speed

So we tried reduce cognitive load (again):
We tried the DevOps model

This provided local optimisation,
but struggled to optimise scaling

So we tried reduce cognitive load (again):
We are now trying the platform model

An effective platform team needs
to balance a number of priorities
➔ Level of business customisation
➔ Ease of adding new capabilities
➔ Speed of access to resources
➔ Cost of ownership and cognitive load

Optimise for: Business customisation
Common implementations:
Reasons this works 🎉
● Completely customised to the
organisation
Challenges faced 😬
● Slow and manual
● High toil for platform teams
● Likely shadow IT

Optimise for: Ease of new capabilities
● An on demand, self service API
● Lacks governance, compliance, cost
management
● API is not bespoke to the business

Optimise for: Speed to new resources
● Widely used, consistent, and
extensible API
● Very low level API for application
teams

Optimise for: Cost of ownership
● High level business offerings
● Who builds it? Who runs it?
● Implementation drift

Technology has presented a false dilemma

Optimise for: the best of each
● Completely customised to the
organisation
● An on demand, self service API
● Widely used, consistent, and extensible
API
● High level business offerings

Shift your focus.
From tech to product.
Platforms require experience design.

Shift your focus.
From tech to product.
Platforms provide an experience.

A digital platform is a foundation of self-service APIs, tools,
services, knowledge and support which are arranged as a
compelling internal product.
Autonomous delivery teams can make use of the platform to deliver
product features at a higher pace, with reduced co-ordination.
“The Platform”

a product has a few key characteristics:
• It has users / customers, who are the key stakeholders in how the product
should deliver value.
• It’s long-lived.
• It evolves over time in response to the needs and desires of the customers.
• It’s “owned” by a person or team.
• It only does what it needs to do. It as important to remove unused or
under-used features as much as it is to evolve new features and functions.
• It has a name.
Characteristics of a product

For a deeper look into Platform-as-a-Product
Help! I need a PaaS
experience on k8s,
yesterday!
Tuesday
4:00 - 4:40pm
Debbie Wood
Senior Product
Manager
Internal Developer Platforms
- Of the people, By the
people, For the people
Wednesday
10:20 - 10:50am
Nicki Watt
CEO & CTO,
OpenCredo
Building OSS Developer
Experiences for the Cloud
Wednesday
10:20 - 10:50am
Mauricio “Salaboy”
Salatino
OSS Engineer,
Diagrid

➔ Identifying where to start with your platform
➔ Use tools that support API first design
➔ Improve implementation independent of user API
Let’s look at how to get started
even with limited time and investment

Step 1:
Identify the biggest team
challenge / business need

Track the most frequent requests

Impact of ad hoc platform requests
➔ Difficult to standardise
➔ Long lead time leads to waste and
possibly shadow IT
➔ Implementation is likely TOIL as
per Google SRE
➔ Difficult to evolve of the process

Step 2:
Stop the negative cycle by introducing an API

What is an API?
An agreed contract between a
producer and one or more
consumers
● Consumers are not exposed
to how an API is
implemented
● APIs provide flexibility for a
producer and simplify design
for a consumer

What is an API?
➔ Discoverable catalog of
offerings
➔ One or more user
interface options
➔ On demand offerings,
even if not instant
delivery
➔ Introduces the idea of a
“do nothing” script
…for a platform

Platforms can be daunting
with their complex domain

Reduce the complexity by starting
with an API first product development

Goal:
Create a simple API with
the maturity to handle
complexities as they grow

Use Kratix to define
your on demand services

Create an internal service catalog

And then compose paved paths

Promises provide flexibility to
introduce an API with minimal effort
xaasCRD
➔ Kubernetes Custom Resource Definition
➔ Defined fields with or without validation
➔ Must define a version, and declare active
xaasPipeline
➔ A set of OCI containers with custom logic
➔ Codifies like a “do nothing” script

Applying API first design using Kratix
xaasCRD
➔ Define an early version (e.g. v1alpha1)
➔ Add fields to capture key data
xaasPipeline
➔ On each request, create a new message
containing the necessary information
➔ Define status information to share with the
requesting user

DEMO
➔ Use the Slack marketplace Promise “as is”
➔ Create a database Promise that also sends a Slack message
➔ Iterate on the database Promise to change the backend to Jira

Key takeaways
➔ Toil can make it seem impossible to make improvements
➔ Communication starts manual but can become automated
➔ APIs allow for clean communication boundaries
➔ Creating an API provides the ability to iterate

While an evolution
may be more practical,
by using the right (OSS) tools
you can achieve a revolution

Thank you
Abby Bangser
abby@syntasso.io • @a_bangser • hachyderm.io/@abangser

Additional reading
➔ https://kratix.io
➔ https://www.syntasso.io/post/the-12-platform-challenges-recap
➔ https://tomgeraghty.co.uk/index.php/platform-as-a-product
➔ https://martinfowler.com/articles/talk-about-platforms.html
➔ https://teamtopologies.com/videos-slides/what-is-platform-as-a-product-clues-from-team-topologies
➔ https://sre.google/sre-book/eliminating-toil/
➔ https://www.slideshare.net/ddegrandis/time-theft-how-hidden-unplanned-work-commit-the-perfect-cri
me-78706707
➔ https://swagger.io/resources/articles/adopting-an-api-first-approach/
➔ https://thenewstack.io/platform-engineers-developers-are-your-customers/

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