Platform engineering teams develop shared products and services that enable application engineering teams to work faster and focus on their own products. This shared responsibility model establishes platform teams to eliminate friction from code commits to customer delivery by developing clustered services and technologies. However, platform engineering is not simply the new operations role because the focus is on product development rather than just hosting other teams' services, and both platform and application engineering teams should have cross-functional skills and a DevOps culture rather than distinct roles.

1. Is Platform
Engineering
the new Ops?
Philipp Garbe, Scout24
@pgarbe

2. @pgarbe
Living in Bavaria, Working in the Cloud
Philipp Garbe

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4. ● Dev vs Ops
● DevOps as a role
● Engineering teams and shared infrastructure
● Platform Engineering
Agenda

5. Dev vs Ops

6. Dev
QA
Ops

7. Dev + QA
Ops

8. Conway’s Law
"Organizations which design systems ...
are constrained to produce designs
which are copies of the communication structures
of these organizations."
Melvin E. Conway (April 1968)

9. Architecture
Monolithic application
One repo
One database
Monolith

10. Why did we change it?
● We wanted to release faster and more often
● Different goals led to discussions
○ Ops: Optimize for stability
○ Dev: Optimize for speed

11. DevOps as a role

12. Dev
Ops
DevOps

13. Architecture
Monolith + Swimlanes
Monolith

14. ● Not every Dev became a DevOp
● Ops became not part of DevOps
● VMs were still not in control of teams
● Time to market: More speed by leveraging managed services
Why did we change it?

15. Tatsu

17. Engineering Teams

18. DevOps is a culture, not a role!

19. ● Yes, it costs money
● But it is an investment
○ In your people
○ In code quality
YBIYRI - You build it, you run it!

20. Architecture
Self Contained Systems
Microservices
20% time for infrastructure stories

21. We changed only the 20% rule
● In many teams if felt wrong doing so much infrastructure / shared
services
● Teams wanted to focus on their products
● T-Shape skills often didn't match
● It doesn't scale
Why did we change it?

22. Platform Engineering

23. Platform EngineeringApplication Engineering

24. Eliminate all friction
from commit to customer
Our mission

26. Shared Responsibility Model
Cluster
Services
Platform Team
Application Team

27. Isn’t that Ops?
NO, because...
● It is a managed product
● Teams can use it or not
● Teams are responsible for their services

28. NO
because...
● It’s not about hosting services from other teams
● It’s about developing products for users
● It’s about products that enable feature teams to work faster
● It’s basically a new mindset
Be careful:
● Do not abstract the cloud
● You’re in competition with the cloud
Is Platform Engineering the new Ops?

29. NO
because...
● DevOps is not a role or team but a culture
● Platform engineering teams should be cross-functional
● Product engineering teams as well
Is Platform Engineering the new DevOps?

30. Questions?

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Philipp Garbe
Twitter: @pgarbe
Blog: garbe.io
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