What Is a Platform Team and What Problems Do They Solve?

Organizations create platform teams to deliver standardized workflows, compliant golden images, and a system of record for cloud adoption across the company. Platform engineers on the team deliver shared infrastructure, runtimes, and other services consumed by developers across the organization.

Platform teams support this by delivering shared services across each layer of cloud infrastructure, helping product teams innovate and iterate at speed. The HashiCorp suite of tools provides solutions for each layer of the cloud infrastructure to enable platform teams to successfully lead this shift to a cloud operating model.

0:00 - Introduction
0:36 - Cloud adoption phase 1 - multiple development teams
2:46 - Cloud adoption phase 2 - centralized platform teams
4:35 - Creating a common pipeline
10:00 - Standardized infrastructure provisioning
11:41 - Full stack with platform teams
12:17 - A layer cake of platform teams
14:23 - Cloud adoption phase 3 - bringing cloud approaches to on-premises infrastructure
15:17 - The platform team maturity curve

HashiCorp provides infrastructure automation software for multi-cloud environments, enabling enterprises to unlock a common cloud operating model to provision, secure, connect, and run any application on any infrastructure. HashiCorp open source tools Vagrant, Packer, Terraform, Vault, Consul, Nomad, Boundary, and Waypoint allow organizations to deliver applications faster by helping enterprises transition from manual processes and ITIL practices to self-service automation and DevOps practices.


#PlatformTeams #Engineering #Infrastructure

[Luther_Luffeigh]

Armon is the real one, already super rich post IPO but still teaches on the white board like he used ❤

[alejandropinzoncastillo]

I really like the way that he shares knowledge, keeping it clear and simple.

[johanballin]

Finally, a coherent explanation of the central role of platform engineering. This describes not only the tooling or components but provided a very clear functional description of how things are glued together. Valuable and clear insights. Kudos!

[nebroTtfeoH]

The icing on the cake is a Platform Portal as a self Service portal where everything is connected.
The leverage is in creating baselines and templates for applications and services to reduce the technology variety and standardise how things are done. So a Developer Team for example requests a new Go backend Service and a fresh app with the helo world template is deployed. The whole setup is done automatically. The devs only need to get into the newly created git repo and start coding.
Backstage is a good example but I expect more to come as it has its own flaws.

[sergdudk]

Thanks for the session, it’s interesting and very applicable. The only concern here is that the title is misleading. It reads as a video about platform engineering as a generic pattern, but in fact is fully focused specifically on cloud.

[greglixandrao]

What a wonderful video, very well put together and very well explained information. Thank you for the shared knowledge. For anyone studying this video, it was a lesson.

[midres]

It seems on the road to industrialize the cloud adoption seems like building a complete ecosystem would be the core value of platform team, as you mentioned they have to provide IaC, PaaS, Observability, CI pipelines. Also adding to the list: applying GitOps practices, and insuring users access and the platform (runtime) in it self is compliant with security best practices.

[ashwindwivedi]

Great explanation. very well done.. thanks!

[declanmcardle]

Very, very similar to what happened in a company I worked for - yes, including the first 6 months/phase #1 of "playing with the new toys".

[dogaarmangil]

15:59 Has anybody noticed that the meaning of the word "platform" has changed in recent years? So the term "platform" as defined in the book "Team topologies" is different from what it used to mean a couple of years ago, and the speaker tends to confuse both meanings. Specifically, the term "platform" in "platform teams" no longer means platform as in "PaaS". Rather, anything that can be provided as a service over the network counts as a platform nowadays. So not only PaaS but also IaaS (Kubernetes etc), SaaS, DBaaS and APIaaS (web APIs etc) are all possible outputs of platform teams.

[jmatya]

The funny part is that the engineers at the bottom always know that phase 1 is going to happen and is going to be a mess, but mostly higher ups don't get that information handed to them.

[DaysOfDevOps]

Great video and explanation. Where does data live and the responsibility of that data live in regards to the platform teams? I speak to these teams in their different guises and depends on how and where that responsibility lands. But my opinion is that a database is part of that app. As soon as the app is in production and serving data then there is a requirement to protect that data against all the failure scenarios. Sometimes this is also landing on the security team. But regardless of platform used data protection and management needs to land somewhere. I would love to see a reply on that from you?

[_xenomorph]

What is a Platform & Integration Engineer role that I’m seeing nowadays ?is it combo role

[sefandan]

One piece I would be interested to know more about is how the IaC - TF - layer could be standardized as a re-usable block across different applications? For example, one app could be running on a single EC2 in AWS and another could be running on an Auto Scaling Group or ECS/Fargate with custom configs specific to the app. Care to elaborate?

[jonburgess]

One thing I didn't quite follow at around 13:50 is when Armon talks about an "escape hatch" where the platform is too limited, and we can drop down in to IaC. What might that mean in practise? Does it mean that application teams write their own little bits of terraform code to match their specific/unusual needs, rather that using the usual platform-provided modules?

[johngiovanni]

I'm an old school IT guy, rebooting myself in cloud.

But man, it amazes me how we have come full circle. We are just using new tools and bringing software defined infrastructure to deprecate the old PS scripting and console UI way of life.

A central "platform" team to deliver services to app devs, is nothing new. I guess they realized having full stack control, was too burdensome after all.

[scott]

You guys spying on us? You're more or less describing how our operation has organized itself over the last 5+ years. But...we have yet to crack the 'Architecture' problem. Agile has poisoned the design phase beyond recognition. Not to argue for waterfall, or any of the other sclerotic enterprisey process monstrosities that strangle innovation, but where are these supposed standards and "templatized" platform product designs supposed to come from? (rhetorical question, natch)

All the shiny innovations of the last decade just assume that piece is getting handled by really really smart folks. News flash: it's not getting handled. It's GIGO, only now with CI/CD, IaC, and even *more* tech debt.