Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit Las Vegas 2024

Why is it so easy to screw up platform engineering, and how do you undo the damage?

Platform engineering… it’s the trendy new buzzword. For a thing we've all been doing for years, ever since someone said, 'What if we re-did Solaris zones but called it Docker instead?' It means building an internal engineering platform for your digital services or data pipelines. It allows you to scale teams up and down, and supercharge their abilities to deliver outcomes.

But here's a thing that nobody likes to talk about. It’s easy to totally screw up platform engineering. When that happens, there’s a huge negative impact on your engineering culture, and your teams aren’t able to achieve their goals. So how do you avoid screwing up, and if it does happen to you, can you actually fix it?

I’ve spent years in platform leadership roles, building internal engineering platforms at different scale-ups and enterprise organizations. I’ve had successes, and I’ve had failures. I’ll cover these screw-ups, and how to escape them:

1. Power tools - teams spend all their time configuring Kafka, Kubernetes, Istio, etc., because the platform is based on overpowered, unnecessary tech
2. Technology anarchy - N teams do the same task in N different ways because the platform has insufficient opinions on tech choices
3. Teams as tickets - teams have to interact with the platform team via tickets, injecting per-ticket queuing delays into their delivery timelines

And I’ll explain why all of these can be traced back to a scaling problem, the granddaddy screw-up of platform engineering - your mindset is platform as a project, not as a product.