A blog post by Charity Majors about Platform Engineering as a next generation of OPS-ish work.

She also created a table of skills, or rather skills differences, between Platform engineers and DevOps engineers. I don’t fully agree with all those differences, but I’m not quite sure yet, is it because I’m not fully onboarded yet to the concept of Platform Engineering or I just generally disagree.

Anyways, if you need a single-sentence summary of the Platform Engineering, let it be this one:

One of the key principles of any developer platform is that it should be easy to do the right things, and hard to do the wrong things.

#culture #platform_engineering

Puppet Labs have issued a new State of DevOps 2023 report.

This time it’s focused on Platform Engineering and how it helps organizations to achieve their goals and move further with their DevOps journey. Key takeaways (opinionated):

- While DevOps helps to foster collaboration and delivery velocity inside teams, platform engineering helps to increase the delivery velocity across the organization.
- Companies that have implemented platform engineering approach are satisfied with it. Also, companies that have platform teams for longer period of time are more satisfied, which is a good sign.
- Platform engineering treats infrastructure (observability, CI/CD, etc.) as a product, not as project. Therefore, platform teams benefit from a product manager position within a team.
- Yet, about a half of respondents have reported that their senior leadership is still concerned about the topic of platform engineering or confused about it.
- Centralized platform team is more common compared to decentralized and people who work in a centralized structure are more satisfied.
- Organizations plan to hire engineers to work on their internal platforms. So, you‘re safe :)
- 01 Normalize the technology stack => 02 Standardize and reduce variability => 03 Expand DevOps practices => 04 Automate infrastructure delivery => 06 Provide self-service capabilities => ???? => PROFIT!!1

#report #culture #platform_engineering #devops

Crossplane 2.0 is out!

Crossplane is a very interesting project, and while I have my own reservations against managing cloud resources with Kubernetes abstractions, I think this project did many things right.

2.0 version takes it a step further. I personally excited abut this part:

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The biggest change in Crossplane 2.0 is that compositions can now include any Kubernetes resource, not just Crossplane-managed infrastructure. This means you can define a composite resource that provisions a database, configures networking, deploys an application, and sets up monitoring, all in one cohesive abstraction.
~~~

This is great! Now, you should be able to define the whole scope of an application with all its infra dependencies as a single artifact, and potentially, ship application templates to manage fleets of similar services. This, in my humble opinion, is the only sane way of providing “a platform” to your developers.

#kubernetes #crossplane #platform_engineering