All aboard the platform engineering hype train

In Summer 2022, platform engineering made its debut on the Gartner Hype Cycles for Emerging Technologies and for Software Engineering… which means it’s finally getting the spotlight it deserves.

(If you’ve subscribed to this newsletter, you’re already ahead of the curve. How does it feel to have been part of the community before it was cool? 😋)

The context is important, though. Platform engineering was introduced as a solution to improve the developer experience. Gartner outlined some of the key principles in A Software Engineering Leader’s Guide to Improving Developer Experience:

1. “Improve developer experience by building internal developer platforms to reduce cognitive load, developer toil and repetitive manual work.”

Reducing cognitive load was a major theme at PlatformCon. In the last years, badly done DevOps has overwhelmed the working memory capacity of developers across too many organizations. Fortunately, top performing organizations discovered that internal platforms can push their setup into the next stage of their DevOps evolution.

2. “Platforms don’t enforce a specific toolset or approach – it is about making it easy for developers to build and deliver software while not abstracting away useful and differentiated capabilities of the underlying core services.”

Y’all have to find the right level of abstraction and pave a golden path to facilitate it. I dive deeper into how to do this in this thread:

TLDR; your platform should have a built in path of least resistance. You can do that in a code-based, declarative way or with UIs on top of your setup.

3. “Platform engineering teams treat platforms as a product (used by developers) and design the platform to be consumed in a self-service manner.”

Platform as a product is the way. Conduct user research, solicit regular user feedback, create a product map, and get internal buy-in for your platform, and you’re basically guaranteed to succeed.

Alternatively, you can become a mind reader and understand how to build a platform everyone wants. … See how that works for you and report back.

I love seeing platform engineering getting the hype it deserves and for a lot of the principles we discussed at PlatformCon to make it into a report as big as Gartner’s. And there’s still so much more to come for the community, so stay tuned!

Short on time? ⏳ We got you 🥐😋

🥐 Have you heard of Platform KPI trees before? Lambros Charissis explains what it is and why Platform Engineering KPIs matter.

🥐 Has this 👇 ever crossed your mind? Insightful thread 🧵 by Alex Xu on Twitter!

🥐 Choose your fighter: DevOps or SRE. Justin Garrison discussed this with Liz Fong-Jones and Emily Freeman on Twitter. You can also read the recap in Justin's blog.

🥐 Some you have already compared your DevOps setup to the industry with our survey. But if you missed it, check out how you stack up against the competition.

🥐 They say the last bite is the tastiest 😉

That wraps up #6. Got some useful nuggets from it? Then share it with your folks and spread the platform love 🎉

This is a community-driven newsletter, so if you have anything 🔥 to share from the cloud-native world, send it our way. You can submit your ideas here.

Stay crunchy 🥐

Luca

All aboard the platform engineering hype train

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