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 3 biggest lessons from the AWS Summit

12000+ people were at the AWS summit in London this week. I feel like I talked to all of them. How can I get started? What is a Minimum Viable Platform? I’ve got my Internal Developer Platform, now what? To think 3 years ago, I had to chase people down to tell them what platform engineering was.

In all these 100+ conversations, these are the 3 biggest things I learned

1. People are still far too focused on the front end of your platform. Building a service catalog with Backstage does not make an Internal Developer Platform (IDP). I lost count of the people I talked to who were trying to find some way to get out of the Backstage quagmire they’d gotten themselves into. Backstage absolutely has its place. But it is a piece of the puzzle, not the end result.

2. Infrastructure peeps don’t fully see yet what platform engineering does for them. Honestly, I don’t blame them. We spend so much time in the community talking about DevEx and faster software delivery and not enough on how platform engineering is going to revolutionize infrastructure. We’ve got to change that.

3. There is still SO much room to grow here. We might finally all be talking about platforms and how best to build and run them, but the majority of orgs have barely gotten started yet. If you hang out in the community all day, you might think everyone is platform engineering full force already but we are still at the beginning of this wave.

Lesson number 4? People still love our DevOps is dead shirts.

The most important thing coming back from the AWS summit, and all of these major live events is just a sense of how far we’ve come. And how far we’ve got still to go.

I can’t wait.

Quick bites

Articles of the week:

• IBM buys Hashicorp
• Platform Engineering in action: Deploy the Online Boutique sample apps

From the community:

• Have a platform engineering question for Kelsey Hightower? Ask here!