Platform Engineering as a (Community) Service • Nicki Watt • GOTO 2021

This presentation was recorded at GOTOpia February 2021. #GOTOcon #GOTOpia

Nicki Watt - CTO/CEO at OpenCredo

ABSTRACT
As organisations drive towards cloud native, many of them have the same recurring requirement: A solid platform to underpin and empower their dev teams to build great software. Enter “The platform" - be this Kubernetes (K8S), some cloud specific services, CloudFoundry, a DIY special or some combo, every engineer and their boss wants a platform.
But what does it take to build such a platform, and build it well? Especially when it needs to accommodate multiple teams, of varying skills, doing similar as well as very different things. How do you build a platform which is fit for purpose?
This talk will explore these questions, looking at key technical aspects to consider, but just as important, organisational, soft skills and other factors which form part of the platform engineering discipline. Drawing on experience of working across a variety of clients with different setups, we look at what [...]

TIMECODES
00:00 Intro
00:48 Our observation
01:30 Agenda
01:56 What is platform engineering?
05:24 Target communities
08:56 Characteristics of a successful platform experience
18:31 How to "platform engineer" well
37:55 Conclusion

Download slides and read the full abstract here:

RECOMMENDED BOOKS

#PlatformEngineering #TeamTopologies #CloudNative #DevOps #Kubernetes #k8s #CloudFoundry #Programming

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[human_devops]

This is great. Nicely organised and presented

[SachinGanpat]

Excellent presentation. So many takeaways from this.

[marcelojscosta]

Conngratulations on the presentation. This is one of the most fantastic works I've ever seen.

[AdamLarson]

This is fantastic, thank you so much for sharing this.

[NoCPU]

Fantastic presentation. I really like your perspective on freedom vs autonomy. You have convinced me to use freedom instead.

[jonassteinberg]

Exceedingly high level. Meant for an executive or other senior manager with virtually no prior understanding of what a platform might actually be.

[dogaarmangil]

29:19 What the speaker calls "tech stacks" is what used to be called "platforms", and the speaker calls Kubernetes a platform whereas it would have been called infrastructure or IaaS a couple of years ago. It seems that "platform" means "platform or infrastructure" these days, in other words "PaaS or IaaS". I wonder why the IT community hasn't picked up on this change in what words mean.

[octopusiicaptn]

Excellent presentation, away from dogmatic, apostolate and evanligistic views. It brings, concisely, words to my inner gut feelings about the whole of it. Not only is for engineers, not only the cool tools and trend of the moment, as you expose it, I find it to be independent as it can always extend, restrain whilst keeping guidelines and flexibility. How do you integrate, mix legacy stuff into the equation though and still provide some of the benefits you presented, thanks. JC

[kayakMike]

Linux is a platform on many platforms...
Distros provide the curation
GNU Tools to build it.

[kayakMike]

Everyone has some sort of platform, whether it's well engineered or not even thought about.