This may be overly negative to a whole field, but I sometimes feek the platform teams add more hurdles than "stability and velocity".<p>At places with basically no platform team, no advanced cloud setup etc, I as a dev could understand everything, and deploying mostly meant getting my jar file or whatever running on some ec2 instance.<p>Now I need to write a dockerfile, loads of manifests, know about ingresses, use whatever custom tooling and abstractions they've built on top of the cloud provider.<p>And what used to be a single guy is now a huge team just adding more complexity. And I'm having a hard time understanding if it's worth it, or just a cost sink.
Ahh yes. The bi-monthly shit on ops comment threads.<p>Ops folks can barely reverse a string. We should not exist as a field. Every company regardless of scale should just use 4 manually provisioned EC2 instances. If that doesn’t work your code is shit and you aren’t using Elixir / Phoenix! Anyone even attempting to use Kubernetes should be branded with the Hetzner logo and forced to work at McDonalds.<p>Fear not HN. McDonalds here I come.
Here's the thing about buzzwords - they are a useful abstraction for grouping together a set of concepts for non-tech people to make decisions with tech impact.<p>The ideas presented here are a good summary of the day-to-day issues I experience as a "DevOps engineer." I wish I had the pull to instigate a shift in mindset towards a more platform-oriented mode of work, but unfortunately for me, that is not the case. Maybe it's wishful thinking, but forwarding articles and presentations like this to senior directors can be a way to influence the direction of their thinking to align more with what you believe to be in the best interest of the organization.
You'd be amazed how little platform engineering is needed if you can violently constrain technology choices.<p>Give me a blobstore and some VMs and I'll be happy, and if someone raises the slightest fuss I will point out that it's still years better than helm.
What does it mean to be greater than the sum of your parts? It is more than just alignment, everybody moving in the same direction: that would just be a well directed sum.Once upon a time, management talked about alignment because just being the sum of your parts would be great if it was all in the same direction. Now, for everybody obsessed with being a force multiplier, it needs to be more than just that.<p>You should find yourself more capable in such an organization, but that is a tall order in today's world. Almost every problem you will face has been solved and help is easy to find even on your own. So being in such an organization should make you more capable of solving problems than your base ability. Someone must have already solved that problem for you and the solution must be in easy reach. That's still a tall order, most solutions you find described on the internet are also in easy reach nowadays.<p>Your platform can also make people less capable. It is easier to be a force multiplier with a coefficient less than one. Make it more difficult to solve problems. Require them to communicate with many teams in order to accomplish anything. Make the solution difficult to integrate and operate and highly non-standard. If the solution is non-standard and the documentation is anything short of impeccable, it will basicly be unlearnable.<p>The book Accelerate and the research backing it indicates that the most productive teams are able to redesign their entire system without talking to anyone and to complete their work without communication and coordination to other teams. Effective platforms advance that. They make it easy for people to redesign their systems to implement good designs. Bad platforms reduce that capability beyond what a person would ordinarily have and user complaints are brushed off with a tautological, "You can't make everyone happy." Bad platforms narrow possibilities and then require product teams to beg platform teams to allow ordinary designs that were cut off.<p>I'm on a platform team and I struggle sometimes trying to figure out if we are helping people or hurting them hence this philosophical rant.
In my opinion a lot of Devops comes down to improving "developer experience" (DX - another buzzword, but still). It starts with project setup and choosing tools that enable this such as JS build tools that are fast. Then you have easy (and again: fast) means of running tests, continuous integration, deployment for staging (or sharing with less technical team members). This has to be as frictionless as possible so developers can actually enjoy their work. A "by-product" is that you can also more easily deploy for production.
I really like that outcomes over outputs is called out. I think this is important whenever programming / development meets The Real World(tm) _ESPECIALLY_ with internal tooling work.
The whole point of “DevOps” was to <i>not</i> have a separate platform/deployment/operations team. Each development team should handle everything needed to build, test, deploy, and monitor production code.<p>Every time I have been on a team where that was <i>not</i> the case, the result was bloated complexity and <i>more</i> failures in production. Usually because the platform/deployment/operations team was composed of not very skilled developers trying to justify their salary to management.<p>If you have worked with a platform/deployment/operations team that was competent and reduced complexity then great for you. I have yet to experience such a phenomenon. Please let me know in comments why you think your experience was different.
> Platform Engineering is the application of a Product Mindset to supporting your engineering organization's software delivery velocity and system stability.<p>so… move fast and don’t break things?<p>must be nice to never have tradeoffs