Platform Engineering Best Practices

Coordinating the efforts of diverse engineering teams is one of the toughest things to crack for CTOs today. The key to ending this chaos is ‘Standardization’. It promotes efficiency and accountability. In my experience, achieving this form of harmony is feasible only by ensuring uniformity in the non-functional aspects of product development — such as security, cost, compliance, and observability. This enables teams with varying priorities to interact and operate without overlapping efforts – and aids in establishing consistent guidelines and practices throughout the company, thereby reducing conflicts. However, achieving this standardization is not easy. Here are six key principles that can steer organizations toward standardization: 1. Move away from an over-reliance on extensive guideline documents that anyone rarely reads, rather move to enforcement in code . 2. Ship validation early in the SDLC by integrating standardized protocols and checks. 3. Create golden paths for developers, as in best practices. 4. Adopt global standards for software delivery that makes it easy for developers, especially new developers to easily adopt. 5. Ensure the delivery platform is not open-ended or overwhelming, guaranteeing outcomes based on developer-centric expectations. 6. Maintain a consistent developer-centric view to ensure only pertinent issues are routed to the developers. #SoftwareDeliveryStandards #PlatformEngineering #DevOps

💡 It doesn't have to be so hard to deploy to prod! 🎯 We need to focus on a few key attributes that make platforms successful, and get them the proper attention and resources. Continuing to dive into the CNCF Platform Whitepaper, they identify 7 key attributes of a successful #platform. I previously covered the first 2, today we will cover the remaining 5: 3. "Documentation and onboarding. Documentation is a key aspect of a successful software product. To be able to use a platform’s offerings, users require documentation and examples. A platform should be delivered with proper documentation addressing the needs of its users. It should also provide tools to accelerate the onboarding of new projects that can help users consume the necessary platform services in a quick and simple way." ✍ - We prefer to implement this with a dedicated outreach, onboarding, and support team that includes #UX discipline. - Strong copywriting and content skill is especially important. - This team should be giving and receiving feedback at least weekly, especially with the automation teams providing the tooling. 4. "Self-service. A platform should be self-serviceable. Users must be able to request and receive capabilities autonomously and automatically." 🙏 - Automation to find/define your golden path, provision related resources, and provide relevant start kits is essential. - Failing to invest in this early becomes the debt that we see bankrupt most orgs as they scale. 5. "Reduced cognitive load for users. An essential goal of a platform is to reduce the cognitive load on product teams. A platform should encapsulate implementation details and hide any complexity that might arise from its architecture." 🧠 - We see this generally done well by enterprise platform teams, however reliability issues often offset it--invest in #reliability! 6. "Optional and composable. Platforms are intended to make product development more efficient, so they must not be an impediment. A platform should be composable and enable product teams to use only parts of its offerings. It should also enable product teams to provide and manage their own capabilities outside of the platform’s offerings when necessary." 🏗 - While this is a must do, in #govtech it is often at odds with GRC controls inheritance. - We built a #grc platform that allows you to draw the auth boundary at the API boundary, enabling cATO in an optional and composable environment. - If you don't have similar automation, allowing optionality will always be at odds with your ability to get ATOs rapidly. 7. "Secure by default. A platform should be secure by default and offer capabilities to ensure compliance and validation based on rules and standards defined by the organization." 🔒 - Compliance and security automation are essential here--check out the cATO video on our blog! What is your experience with these 5 attributes? How do you approach them? #prodoritdidnthappen

❌ "Build it and they would come" Is the most common (and incorrect) mindset I've seen people have whilst building Enterprise patterns in Platform Engineering. Focus on the "wins": When evangelizing platform engineering patterns, prioritize demonstrating tangible benefits to developers on their immediate projects. This could include: ✔ Reduced development time: Show how using the pattern cuts down on boilerplate code or repetitive tasks. ✔ Improved code quality: Explain how the pattern leads to more maintainable and scalable code. ✔ Simplified deployments: Highlight how the pattern enables smoother integrations and easier deployments. ✔ Increased developer productivity: Point out how the pattern empowers developers to focus on core features instead of infrastructure concerns. By focusing on specific, quantifiable improvements that directly impact developers' day-to-day work, you'll have a much stronger case for adopting platform engineering patterns. Remember, developers care most about tools that make their lives easier and their work more impactful. #platformengineering #cloudnative #devops #softwareengineering #patterns