/Platform

The Next Platform

- Mac Chaffee tl;dr: “As someone who has built a career on Kubernetes, I'm always thinking about what "the next platform" is for job security purposes. By "platform", I mean the kind that platform engineers like myself build for internal dev teams on which to run their applications.” Mac shares a rough list of problems with Kubernetes - based platforms and a list of requirements for "the next platform.

featured in #572


How We Built Ngrok's Data Platform

- Christian Hollinger tl;dr: “How we built it, what we learned, as well as some selective deep dives I found interesting enough to be worth sharing in more detail, since they’ll bridge the gap between what people usually understand by the term “data engineering” and how we run data here at ngrok. Some of this might even be useful for your own data platform endeavors, whether your team is big or small.”

featured in #556


Generative AI For High-Quality Mobile Testing

tl;dr: “The Developer Platform team at Uber is consistently developing new and innovative ideas to enhance the developer’s experience and strengthen the quality of our apps. Quality and testing go hand in hand, and in 2023 we took on a new and exciting challenge to change how we test our mobile applications, with a focus on machine learning (ML). Specifically, we are training models to test our applications just like real humans would.”

featured in #509


Platform Teams Have Too Many Tools

tl;dr: There’s a new wave of platform tools and understanding what they are, when to use them, and how they differentiate is challenging. What’s a cloud development environment? How do you use platform orchestrators and Kubernetes? What does IDP even stand for? And how does all of this fit into a platform strategy?

featured in #471


How Platform Teams Get Stuff Done

- Pete Hodgson tl;dr: “Platform teams have a unique reliance on other teams to ensure adoption of their platform - getting code changes into other teams' codebase is critical to their success. There are a variety of patterns for that cross-team collaboration, and selecting the right ones depends on both the phase of platform adoption and the ability of both teams and codebases to accept external influence.”

featured in #433


How Platform Engineering Works

- Chad McElligott tl;dr: “I feel confident you will have a solid foundation upon which to build an effective Platform Engineering team if you follow these four principles”: (1) Set goals on outcomes, not outputs. (2) Truly know your customer. (3) Invent on behalf of your customer. (4) Scale your impact.

featured in #426


The Future of Ops Is Platform Engineering

- Charity Majors tl;dr: "In the beginning, there were people who wrote and ran software. At some point, we spun away ops skills from dev skills into two different professions, but that turned out to be a ginormous mistake, so along came DevOps to reunify them. Nowadays, ops as an independent profession is in the process of fading out. Companies are spinning down their ops teams left and right. Engineers who formerly identified as sysadmins or operations have turned into DevOps engineers, and soon there will just be “software people” again. This is the way of things."

featured in #361


What I Learned Building Platforms At Stitch Fix

tl;dr: "I was lucky enough to spend the last six years focusing on “engineering for data science” and learning to build great platforms." Stefan guides us through 5 lessons he learned: (1) Focus on adoption, not completeness. (2) Your users are not all equal. (3) Abstract away the internals of your system. (4) Live your users’ life cycle. (5) The two layer API trick. 

featured in #359


Platform Engineering KPIs

tl;dr: "In this post we will share our approach to building out KPI trees for our platform engineering teams... Starting with the product development process, we will explain how we shaped our platform vision, resulting in a set of actionable KPIs that we use to identify our biggest problems and continuously measure our platform’s performance."

featured in #343