Hey there! This is Platform Weekly, your weekly holiday into the sunny & sandy world of platform engineering. This week we’re stepping out of the cloud, and down into the hard metallic core of bare metal🤘

Is this Military-Grade Platform Engineering?

Platform engineering is the future of cloud native right? You don’t need me to tell you that. It’s the new frontier of cloud based technological advancement. But what happens when your client can’t be on the cloud? Or is on the cloud, AND on prem in a beautiful air-gapped chunk of bare metal?

Well, André from Bechtle (One of Germany’s biggest Tech companies) in his awesome talk at KubeCon Paris talked about the possibilities for huge public sector businesses that can operate like that. 

“We’ve been developing microservices since 2014. You can imagine the frankensteins and nightmares that we’ve seen”

When dealing with highly regulated public sector clients, you’re often faced with:

• Deploying to multiple environments (running on public cloud, private cloud, or on prem air-gapped)
• Unless you live in Korea or Estonia, you’re likely facing a massive skill gap
• You’re dealing with the highest security requirements possible

So what might a platform that handles all that look like?

Take a look at this glorious platform reference architecture. They’ve got three Resource Planes, running on the Azure Stack, one on their own datacenter and then one on the customers data center (a data center for air-gapped environments at that!)

This could be an absolute mess, and a nightmare for developers, but so far… it isn’t. Thanks to Platform Engineering.

The IDP above uses the workload specification Score to let developers uniformly describe resource needs across any cloud, eliminating the need for Kubernetes or target environment-specific knowledge. This means that the developer experience doesn’t change, no matter how complicated the underlying tech setup is.

This lets them abstract away complexity and ensure a consistent, and massively improved developer experience.

Sounds pretty good, eh? But that is just one piece of this platform puzzle.

I know you want more details. But you want to hear it directly from André. Trust me.

Quick bites

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