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Paving the path towards platform engineering using a comprehensive reference model.pptx
- 1. Paving the path towards platform engineering using a comprehensive reference model by Ruben van de Kamp Kees C. Bakker Zhiming Zhao
- 2. About Ruben ● Recent graduate Master Software Engineering at the University of Amsterdam ● Senior Software Engineer ● Working on services, integrations, automation and frontend ● Passionate about web development and platform engineering ● TypeScript / Python Databricks, NodeJS, Flask Sports, Economy Ruben van de Kamp ruvdkamp@gmail.com linkedin.com/in/ruben-vd-kamp
- 3. 3 About Kees ● Pathfinder & Software Engineer for Wehkamp Tech ● Working on architecture, integrations, automation and chatops ● Passionate about web, marketing & automation ● C# / .NET Core TypeScript+NodeJS, PySpark+Databricks Techblog, History Kees C. Bakker @KeesTalksTech KeesTalksTech.com kbakker@wehkamp.nl linkedin.com/in/keescbakker
- 4. 1. Who is Wehkamp? 2. How to implement platform engineering? 3. Case study 4. Conclusions & future work 4 Topics
- 7. over 2.500 brands WE Fashion // Vingino //Mango // Tommy Hilfiger // Scotch & Soda // ONLY // Private Label wehkamp home // HK living // Woood // Zuiver // Riverdale // House Doctor >300.000 different products >560.000 daily visitors 783 million Sales 21/22 >11 million sent packages >1.000 colleagues 80% of all customers shop mobile 72% of our customers are female Wehkamp facts Focus on: fashion // living // beauty / baby & kids
- 8. How we run www.wehkamp.nl Focus on: delivery 334.000 avg. requests per minute* 19.6 GiB avg. bandwidth per minute* 3 FE stacks: web, IOS, Android 150 Micro-sites & services 50+ engineers + POs 10 autonomous DevOps teams 1 platform team It ain’t easy being fast Not just a website. It’s an e-commerce platform! * Thursday 2023-10-24 20:00 - 22:30 CEST according to Cloudflare Statistics Dashboard
- 9. 9 What ignited our research?
- 10. 10 What ignited our research? Feels like they are describing what we’re trying to do. Platform as a self- service product for developers? Source: thenewstack.io/how-is-platform- engineering-different-from-devops-and-sre/
- 11. 11 What ignited our research? Many of our services have the same basic features in terms of observability. We must be able to scaffold or provision them, just like our databases, right? Source: engineering.atspotify.com/2020/08/ How-we-use-golden-paths-to-solve- fragmentation-in-our-software-ecosystem
- 12. Definition | Research questions | Related work | Reference Model How to implement platform engineering?
- 13. ● Discipline to improve productivity and efficiency across teams by standardizing and centralizing tools by introducing a platform. ● Instead of focussing on a team level, it focuses on the organization level. ● Tries to solve the following challenges: proliferation of tools deployment difficulties cloud expenses and communication between teams 13 What is platform engineering?
- 14. Main research question How can a software organization effectively integrate platform engineering using a comprehensive reference model? 14 Research Questions RQ1 How to model platform engineering in the context of a software company? RQ2 How to define a customized platform engineering design tailored to a specific organization? RQ3 How to effectively construct a technical platform engineering implementation?
- 15. ● Scientific research → scarcity 15 How to implement platform engineering? Related work
- 16. ● Scientific research → scarcity ● Industry related articles → technical (commercial) approach 16 How to implement platform engineering? Related work
- 17. ● Based on the Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing (ODP-RM) 17 How to implement platform engineering? The Platform Engineering Reference Model (PE-RM)
- 18. 18 How to implement platform engineering? Methodology - PE-RM
- 19. ● Platform engineering lifecycle 19 Platform Engineering Reference Model Enterprise viewpoint
- 20. ● Platform engineering lifecycle ● Application lifecycle 20 Platform Engineering Reference Model Enterprise viewpoint
- 21. ● Platform engineering lifecycle ● Application lifecycle ● Stakeholders 21 Platform Engineering Reference Model Enterprise viewpoint
- 22. ● Platform engineering lifecycle 22 Platform Engineering Reference Model Information viewpoint Legend Information objects (black) Action objects (blue) Engineering Platform (green)
- 23. ● Platform engineering lifecycle ● Application lifecycle 23 Platform Engineering Reference Model Information viewpoint Legend Information objects (black) Action objects (blue) Engineering Platform (green)
- 24. ● Operations ● Depends on organization ● Golden paths ● Examples: ○ Maintain golden paths ○ Utilize golden paths ○ Provision application domain ○ Deploy application 24 Platform Engineering Reference Model Computational viewpoint
- 25. 25 Platform Engineering Reference Model Engineering viewpoint
- 26. ● Implementation of the platform 26 Platform Engineering Reference Model Technology viewpoint
- 27. ● Implementation of the platform ● Brownfields vs greenfield 27 Platform Engineering Reference Model Technology viewpoint Can be: Grafana, Prometheus, CloudWatch, Datadog, etc. Can be: Jenkins, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, etc. Start with the tooling that is currently used.
- 28. Conceptual design | Technical implementation | Experiments How to validate platform engineering?
- 29. 29 Conceptual design Enterprise viewpoint ● Gap analysis ● Organizational structure is in place ● Need to redefine roles ● Missing consultation structures
- 30. 30 Conceptual design Enterprise viewpoint ● Gap analysis ● Organizational structure is in place ● Need to redefine roles ● Missing consultation structures (1) Pathfinders: more formally involved in the engineering lifecycle.
- 31. 31 Conceptual design Enterprise viewpoint ● Gap analysis ● Organizational structure is in place ● Need to redefine roles ● Missing consultation structures (1) Pathfinders: more formally involved in the engineering lifecycle (2) Accountability on platform changes should be made more formal: planning and delivery to stakeholders
- 32. 32 Conceptual design Enterprise viewpoint ● Gap analysis ● Organizational structure is in place ● Need to redefine roles ● Missing consultation structures (1) Pathfinders: more formally involved in the engineering lifecycle. (3) Main stakeholders of the platform. (2) Accountability on platform changes should be made more formal: planning and delivery to stakeholders.
- 33. 33 Conceptual design Enterprise viewpoint ● Gap analysis ● Organizational structure is in place ● Need to redefine roles ● Missing consultation structures (1) Pathfinders: more formally involved in the engineering lifecycle. (2) Accountability on platform changes should be made more formal: planning and delivery to stakeholders. (3) Main stakeholders of the platform. (4) New stakeholder for golden path adaptations which should implement new platform features.
- 34. 34 Conceptual design Informational viewpoint (1) Improve documentation and facilitate communication between platform and development teams.
- 35. 35 Conceptual design Informational viewpoint (2) To enhance understanding of the platform and productivity of the development teams. (1) Improve documentation and facilitate communication between platform and development teams.
- 36. 36 Conceptual design Informational viewpoint (3) Boost productivity, increase standardization and best practices, resulting in improved onboarding time (2) To enhance understanding of the platform and productivity of the development teams. (1) Improve documentation and facilitate communication between platform and development teams.
- 37. 37 Conceptual design Informational viewpoint (4) Formal way for development teams to request new platform features.
- 38. ● Currently we provision infra like databases. ● We might be able to provision applications? 38 Conceptual design Computational viewpoint
- 40. 40 Conceptual design Technology viewpoint No developer portal as a central starting point for self service provisioning, docs, observability, software catalog, etc.
- 41. 41 Conceptual design Technology viewpoint No developer portal as a central starting point for self service provisioning, docs, observability, software catalog, etc. The platform is not treated as 1 integrated product.
- 42. By building a prototype in which we can experiment. How to validate platform engineering?
- 43. ● Otomi ● Backstage 44 Technical implementation Architecture
- 48. By experimenting! How to validate platform engineering?
- 49. 50 What experiments did we design? Experiment 1 Does the platform improve productivity? Experiment 2 Is this something the developer community wants? Experiment 3 Is this doable in a production environment? performance analysis usability study expert feedback
- 50. ● Use case Experiments Performance analysis
- 51. ● Use case ● Three tasks 1. Deploy react application to dev 2. Deploy nestjs application to prod 3. Gather logs and metrics of application in production Experiments Performance analysis
- 52. ● Role ● Ease of use ● Platform task ratio Experiments Usability study easy difficult
- 53. ● Role ● Ease of use ● Platform task ratio ● Likeable feature ● Recommendation Experiments Usability study
- 54. ● Role ● Platform design ● Ease of use Experiments Platform experts feedback difficult easy
- 55. ● Role ● Platform design ● Ease of use ● Applicability in organization ● Integration other systems ● Recommendation Experiments Platform experts feedback not applicable very applicable
- 56. Conclusions Findings | Future work
- 57. ● PE-RM to model platform engineering in the context of an organization ● Conceptual design guided by the PE-RM ● Technical implementation guided by the PE-RM ● Expose the added value and practical implementation of platform engineering ● Complexity of modelling a methodology (example: accountability) ● Organizational depended decisions 58 Conclusions Achievements
- 58. RQ1: How to model platform engineering in the context of a software company? ● Platform Engineering Reference Model (PE-RM) ● Validation by case study 59 Conclusions Research questions
- 59. RQ2: How to define a customized platform engineering design tailored to a specific organization? ● Conceptual design guided by the PE-RM 60 Conclusions Research questions
- 60. RQ3: How to effectively construct a technical platform engineering implementation? ● Basic engineering platform implementation ● Validation with experiments ● Showcase added value of platform engineering 61 Conclusions Research questions
- 61. Main research question: How can a software organization effectively integrate platform engineering using a comprehensive reference model? ● Platform Engineering Reference Model ● Case study validation 62 Conclusions Research questions
- 62. ● Implement the reference model in a case study to measure the outcomes ● Case studies within different types of organizations ● NOTE: The field is new → changes could be needed 63 Conclusions Future work
- 63. Paving the path towards platform engineering using a comprehensive reference model by Ruben van de Kamp Kees C. Bakker Zhiming Zhao
Editor's Notes
- KEES Paper is based on the master thesis of Ruben van de Kamp, investigating platform engineering at Wehkamp.
- KEES Recent graduate Master Software Engineering at the University of Amsterdam - - graduated with an honours Have been working for Wehkamp almost 4 years (Product Information team)
- KEES Explain path finder: Not only enterprise architecture Also way of working Turning strategy into delivery
- KEES First we’re going to give some context about Wehkamp and our engineering setup Then we’re going to look at platform engineering We’ll elaborate on our case study And we’ll share the conclusions
- KEES
- KEES WRG: Wehkamp Retail Group 3 webshops: Wehkamp, Kleertjes.com and Union River
- KEES Let’s focus on Wehkamp and some statistics Quite an operation
- KEES
- KEES How did we get here?
- KEES Article by The New Stack introducing Platform Engineering Had not heard about it yet It feels like a fit, we already use many tools in our container platform.
- KEES Golden paths feel like a fit Again, the fit is there: observability (logs, metrics) are 100% shared. Most services use a form of dependency injection and ORM that is not so different. So the main question is: How can we implement platform engineering? One way to start: get a graduate student to do some research! So here’s where Ruben comes in!
- RUBEN
- RUBEN Before we dive into the research we first want to give a short explanation of what platform engineering is and why it is important Platform to centralize and standardize tools Focusses on organization instead of team level
- RUBEN Main focus: How can platform engineering be implemented In order to give answer: 3 questions: How to model How to design guided by PE-RM How to implement guided by PE-RM
- RUBEN It can be concise: not a lot of research done. We have focussed on what reference models there are related to other methodologies: DevOps and Agile Focusses on team level and therefore not sufficient for platform engineering How to model a reference model: ODP-RM -> later will be explained
- RUBEN Many articles talking on what they believe platform engineering is White paper from humanitec -> reference architecture, but only focusses on technical implementation
- RUBEN ODP-RM → multiple viewpoints to give better understanding
- RUBEN Created with a iterative process where we interviewed different experts
- RUBEN First thing will be how the platform lifecycle will work, by introducing a platform it needs to have a lifecycle Two starting positions: no adoption, new features Lead to same lifecycle where platform is build
- RUBEN The existing development lifecycle will stay the same Platform engineering will have impact on provision of application domain that will help in development lifecycle
- RUBEN First talk about platform team Talk about development team and that they are stakeholders of the platform Development guild → important for golden paths Enterprise architects
- RUBEN Point out the platform version and golden paths Development guilds are maintaining these golden paths
- RUBEN Explain that the development team will create an application design and based on that they can come up with platform feature requests
- RUBEN Operations can be separated into two functionalities: getting applications in production and keeping applications in production Computational viewpoint is more difficult → can be different for each organisation Golden paths are essential in the translation of these operations The sequence diagram separates the different actors in planes which we will showcase in the engineering viewpoint Diagram link: https://app.diagrams.net/#G13CGjLkFYjmYsTMrY3XqGA_1XHfFMPVkd
- RUBEN Based on the Humanitec reference architecture since the separation of planes are valid Normally it is important to point out the objects and channels, but this way we can better translate into real world scenarios Developer Portal: one stop shop for self service
- RUBEN It depends on the organization and what tools they already use Brownfield project More focussed on the standardization and guidelines on what would be most suitable in this platform
- RUBEN It depends on the organization and what tools they already use Brownfield project More focussed on the standardization and guidelines on what would be most suitable in this platform
- KEES Nice overview by Ruben Let’s see how this matches at Wehkamp First we’ll create a conceptual design And than Ruben will guide us through a prototype to do some experiments so validate our model
- KEES Redefine roles Missing consultation structures: backlog management, planning, delivery sessions
- KEES Implementation of features Do’s or don’t – guard against excessive feature
- KEES
- KEES Now: users, eat what you get PE: stakeholder with influence
- KEES Golden path as a reference architecture Golden path as a jump start
- No formal delivery, poor versioning of the platform Individual tools are now versioned and communicated Platform should be one integrated product
- Measure effectiveness
- Missing golden paths
- Missing process to further do platform development from the dev team perspective Again: it is all about individual tools
- Less effort Standardize on default settings
- KEES Let’s add the tools to the boxes of the technology viewpoint Our tools fit very well within the model
- KEES No dev portal
- KEES The platform is not treated as 1 integrated product. Ruben wants to do some experiments We’re missing metrics Let’s get them from our pipelines / GitHub Ruben wants to do some experiments
- Ruben wants to do some experiments We’re missing metrics Let’s get them from our pipelines / GitHub
- RUBEN
- RUBEN We mainly used two open source tools from which we continued to implement the platform: Otomi: PaaS solution → helps to setup a lot of the tooling, however the configurations of the tooling and the way it all interacts as one implementation in this research had to be done manually Backstage: this is the main point of work, this linked everything together including templates etc.
- RUBEN In order to showcase the added value a platform will bring to the organization and development teams we have created a very based application lifecycle You will start with creating your application domain: Create repository Pipelines Maybe some boilerplating You will develop your application You want to update your domain by making deployment files You want to monitor you application
- RUBEN We have created golden paths that will have only one input: the application name It will do the following: Create your repository Create your CI/CD pipelines Create your docker registry Scaffold the application with best practices
- RUBEN When you want to deploy an application you can use a different golden path → setup deployment workload files This will take care of the following Create yaml files for argocd to deploy application Setup the docker image to the latest version that has been stored Update pipelines to automatically deploy when new version is released
- RUBEN Because the application are scaffolded in the golden paths they will all expose defaults metrics Use predefined dashboards to see the metrics
- RUBEN Now that we have created a prototype we can do some experiments to see if it actually has any effects
- RUBEN We did three experiments: Performance analysis: validate if it is actually helping developers Usability study: is this platform something that the developers want Expert feedback: is the implementation suitable within an organization Performance analysis and usability study are done in one experiment
- People from inside and outside the organization were asked Before we did the experiments we asked the participants to give an estimation on the time it would take them to deploy an entire application to production in which they already have the tools available, they only have to make the entire devops lifecycle Average: almost 7 hours
- The participants are divided into two categories: No tutorial: deploy react application to dev Tutorial: deploy nestjs application to Prod, but also dev Tutorial: gather logs and metrics of application in production The average time it took to get an application to production was around 22 minutes which is much lower than the average of almost 7 hours.
- After the tasks the participants were asked to fill in a questionnaire Role → different type of roles to get feedback from different experienced people Ease of use → accidentally reversed the scale, however the ease of use was pretty create, however the open questions suggests that the multiple ui’s made it more difficult Based on open questions a tutorial and documentation is very helpful especially when onboarding new developers Task ratio → the platform did almost all the tasks, which is exactly how the participants experienced the experiments
- Likeable feature → backstage and the golden paths, since it gave the developers an easier time setup their infrastructure Recommendation → everybody suggests to introduce this within their work
- IMPORTANT: tell about the fact that we first did a demo and discussion to give them the most information before the questionnaire Role → different types of roles, not on experience but more on the way they are located in the organization, different viewpoints Platform design → the design of the platform was great, both technical as well as functional Ease of use → they believe the platform is easy to use
- Applicability → not always very high → this was expected since each organization could have their own way of implementing things or have an existing tool set Integration with other systems → same thing, depends on the organization since green field projects is not likely Recommend → everybody would recommend the platform however Otomi is not always the best solution
- RUBEN Now that we have explained to you what we have done it is time to wrap things up and summarize our research
- RUBEN
- Now we only have created a reference model and validated it with a conceptual design and a separate prototype It would be better to implement it in a real organization and see the effect, but that will take time Case studies within more organizations to see if is applicable to a range of organizations The field is new, so it can change fast and therefore the reference model needs to be updated (if necessary) Although we have tried to keep it as general as possible
- KEES