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Adopting K8s can be a 🐕. This week, I’m sharing a few pointers that can help.

Let’s get bakin’

6 enterprise tips for scaling K8s adoption

Kubernetes is a powerful tool, yet many enterprises still struggle to adopt it well. A few weeks ago, EY’s Turja Narayan Chaudhuri shared his tips for scaling K8s adoption more reliably with the platform engineering community. Here’s the skinny:

1️⃣ Enforce standardization. Every cluster your enterprise provisions should start from the same template, script, or automation pipeline. Your developers shouldn’t need to set up or operate new clusters, or deviate from approved baselines.

2️⃣ Enable self-service with a thoughtfully-designed catalog. Chaudhuri recommends featuring the most widely used tools on your self-service catalog to facilitate the highest possible level of developer autonomy. Mandating practices is a failing strategy. Instead, do user research to understand what your devs need and start by addressing those first.

3️⃣ Create a central governance team. These folks will handle management, oversight, and operation of K8s workloads, helping you better control what happens across the entire enterprise.

4️⃣ Create a documentation repo for K8s. Chaudhuri recommends going beyond general knowledge guides and addressing real-world use cases—troubleshooting services, connecting to clusters from laptops, and so on.

5️⃣ Create a centralized SRE of K8s Ops team for 24/7 support. How you go about doing this and the level of service this team provides is completely up to you. However, your support team should have ownership over keeping your K8s platform running smoothly.

6️⃣ Leverage automation. This is key to most successful K8s adoptions. Your automation should facilitate easy deployment of containers and management of pods on these clusters. Chaudhuri recommends going beyond supporting the infrastructure itself and remembering the bigger picture: You want to keep users from doing things from scratch.

Want to dive in deeper? I highly recommend checking out the full article.

Short on time? ⏳ We got you 🥐😋

🥐 The platform engineering community celebrated hitting 10k members on Slack with a cozy fireside chat. I was joined by The New Stack’s Jennifer Riggins, Twilio’s Asaf Erlich, and Palo Alto Network’s Ramesh Nampelly.

🥐 Want to break into platform engineering? The folks at Spiceworks put together this 🔥 guide to key skills, job descriptions, and salary.

🥐 Here’s how Levels.fyi scaled to millions of users with Google Sheets as a backend.

🥐  We got 500+ talk submissions for PlatformCon 2023! Get hyped for this year’s lineup and don’t forget to register.

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Last but not least, have you joined the Platform Engineering Slack channel? If not, you're missing out. Here are the highlights:

• Good resources for learning about IDPs?
• How do development teams working in a cloud environment test solutions in the local environment?
• What is the modern stack for internal engineering documentation?

And that’s a wrap on this week! As always, this newsletter is a community project. So if you have anything awesome to share from the cloud-native world, send it our way.

Stay crunchy 🥐

Luca

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