Platform got haters? You might not be doing anything wrong.

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People hate your platform? You might not be doing anything wrong.

If you’re starting out on your platform engineering journey, you cannot and should not try to please everybody. Here’s why:

1️⃣ It’s impossible to cover every technical case.

The world of cloud-native is too differentiated and crowded for your platform to cover all edge cases. Building a platform that meaningfully covers the K8s ecosystem is challenging enough. Weaving in serverless, VMs, and all of your legacy tech is impossible.

The same is true for resources. Is it great to have every new AWS service on your platform? Maybe in theory. But this would be impossible to maintain at high quality and with good DevEx.

If your developers want SLA-backed, supported resources, they’re going to have to stay on your golden paths. Don’t over-optimize for the 20% of edge cases at the expense of the other 80% of use cases.

2️⃣ You’ll always have developers who hate your platform.

It sucks, but it’s true. Even if they don’t tell you, maybe 15-25% of your developers may still boycott you and your platform efforts. More often than not, they’ll be juniors (or, more dangerously, juniors who think that they’re senior). They haven’t seen shit hit the fan at speed and scale.

Don’t spend all your time trying to convince these folks. Let them deviate from your golden paths, and make sure that they know they’re on their own.

Try this instead 👉 The most effective way to drive platform adoption is by investing in a dedicated product manager. A platform product manager can help translate conflicting perspectives and feedback into an actionable set of priorities. This way, you know that you’re building a great Internal Developer Platform for all of your users, not just a vocal minority.

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َQuick Bites

• McKinsey stirred up some controversy when they published this report on how to measure software developer productivity. Gergely Orosz and Kent Beck published a great article explaining why they think McKinsey’s framework could set software engineering organizations back and offer a different approach.

• And another great take on measuring developer productivity from Abi Noda:

• It isn’t SRE vs. platform engineering, it’s SRE and platform engineering. Here’s how platforms can take SRE to the next level.

• Ben Voss created this comprehensive guide to value stream mapping for platform product managers.

• “I’ve been writing software for 25 years, and nothing renders a software team useless like Scrum does.”

• A few weeks ago, HashiCorp’s move to a Business Source License (BSL) set off a big conversation about the future of open source. The OpenTF Manifesto emerged as prominent opposition to HashiCorp’s decision, but not everyone is on board. One organization explains why they are not supporting OpenTF.

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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