From Agile over DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering, the next popular discipline is Platform Engineering. While Platform Engineering doesn’t kill DevOps or anything else, an effective platform will elevate engineering productivity and system reliability. There are many common misunderstandings and pitfalls that reduce our ability to realize the potential of Platform Engineering. This talk covers ways we as industry, organizations and teams get Platform Engineering wrong. After this talk you will have gotten some new ways to look at Platform Engineering, see the challenges and have gotten some pointers to get you started in a good direction. Link to video: https://youtu.be/oq1tSjnYeJs

1. Platform Engineering
is hard!
and we are doing it wrong!
Dan Grøndahl Glavind
@dangrondahl

3. PLATFORM ENGINEERING

4. Adopting platforms
INNOVATORS
EARLY
ADOPTERS
EARLY
MAJORITY
LATE
MAJORITY
LAGGARDS
where are we?

5. Dev Ops DevOps Platform
TEAM PATTERNS
AND COLLABORATION

6. Ops
Dev
work
change
change
info
info
info
The gap between Dev and Ops

7. OPS
work
Dev
Dev
Dev work work
Dev
Dev
Dev
CHANGE
Does Dev and Ops teams scale?

8. DevOps
info
change
change
change
info
info
The full stack DevOps team
change
info

9. DevOps
Does DevOps teams scale?
DevOps
DevOps
DevOps
DevOps
DevOps
“You build it, you run it”
“You build it, you run it”
“You build it, you run it”
“You build it, you run it”
“You build it, you run it”
“You build it, you run it”
“You build it, you run it”
“You build it, you run it”

10. Dev change
info
info
The Platform team
Platform
learn consume
change
change
change
info
info

11. Dev
Does the Platform team scale?
Platform
learn
Dev Dev Dev De
Dev
learn learn learn
consume

12. “It depends”

13. What is The Platform?

14. - Evan Bottcher
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 coordination.
What is a platform?

15. BUILD SHIP RUN
CAPABILITIES
APIS
DOCS TOOLS SUPPORT
INTERFACES
SERVICES
FOUNDATION
CLOUD / ON-PREM / …
INFRA
DEVELOPER
VISIBILITY
More visible
Less visible

16. I must
convince my
boss about
this!

17. Yes!
Make a platform
that is… great!

18. ASSESS TRIAL ADOPT
Cloud
Resources
Languages
and
frameworks
Techniques Tools
Your organizational
landscape

19. Mission
The platform should reduce
costs and fit every teams’ needs.

20. Mission
We will create, maintain and evolve an
Internal Developer Platform (IDP)
for containerized workloads.
The purpose of the IDP is to provide a path
for teams within the <x> domain to become
more productive with a measurable
improvement in Time to Value.

21. Create a
Team Charter
Welcome to Team Awesome
● Our mission
● Who’s on our team
● How we want to collab with you
● …

22. Let’s build
the
foundation
first
“

23. Multi
tenancy
Network and
Service Mesh
Load
balancers
Policies
Secrets
Cluster failover
Identity and Access
Management
Observability
Hybrid cloud
support
The fat foundation

24. BEWARE THE RABBIT HOLE

25. BUILD SHIP RUN
CAPABILITIES
APIS
DOCS TOOLS SUPPORT
INTERFACES
SERVICES
FOUNDATION
CLOUD / ON-PREM / …
INFRA
DEVELOPER
VISIBILITY
More visible
Less visible

26. 3
Clouds
7
Clusters
1M
Lines of
yaml
3
Envs
Focusing on scale upfront
0
Services
running in
prod

27. Why should I
fund you?

28. COMPLEXITY

29. Scale is not a
startup problem.
Customers and
market fit is!

30. BUILD SHIP RUN
CAPABILITIES
APIS
DOCS TOOLS SUPPORT
INTERFACES
SERVICES
FOUNDATION
CLOUD / ON-PREM / …
INFRA
DEVELOPER
VISIBILITY
More visible
Less visible

31. BUILD SHIP RUN
CAPABILITIES
APIS
DOCS TOOLS SUPPORT
INTERFACES
SERVICES
FOUNDATION
CLOUD / ON-PREM / …
INFRA
DEVELOPER
VISIBILITY
More visible
Less visible

32. Usable
Can the value easily be experienced by developers?
Viable
Is it meeting the needs of the developers?
Feasible
Is it possible to deliver easily?
Valuable
Answering yes to all of the above
Is it valuable?

33. Let’s talk
abstractions

34. $ alias yolo=”kubectl apply”

35. Service
Interface
Good abstractions hides complexity
Infra

36. Let me tell you about
all this complexity,
that I have hidden
from you!

37. Current
Interface
Good abstractions lowers coupling
New
Infra A Infra B

38. VISIBLE
ENABLERS
NEED TO MASTER
NEED TO UNDERSTAND
SHOULD KNOW EXISTS
SHOULD NOT KNOW ABOUT
foundation
infra
interface
concept/
capability

39. VISIBLE
ENABLERS
NEED TO MASTER
NEED TO UNDERSTAND
NEED TO KNOW EXISTS
SHOULD NOT KNOW ABOUT
foundation
infra
interface
concept/
capability

40. VISIBLE
ENABLERS
NEED TO MASTER
NEED TO UNDERSTAND
NEED TO KNOW EXISTS
SHOULD NOT KNOW ABOUT
foundation
infra
interface
concept/
capability

41. Create a clear
mission
and align on it

42. Beware the
rabbithole

43. Don’t build on
assumptions

44. Make usable
abstractions

45. https://github.com/dangrondahl/platform-engineering-starters-kit