With over 35,000 attendees, PlatformCon 2024 is officially the world’s largest platform engineering event, and we are incredibly proud to be one of its main organizers.
From Humanitec colleagues to friends and fans, we were able to make an incredible impact this year, and if I do say so myself, share a lot of incredibly valuable content with the platform engineering community.
From talks by Humanitec colleagues to use cases and deep dives by companies like Bechtle, Google, and Redhat, this year’s PlatformCon provided a great way to see what Humanitec is all about and the powerful impact our tooling can have on an organization's platform engineering journey.
Silos are fantastic
As a major highlight of the event, our CEO Kaspar von GrĂĽnberg sat down with Kelsey Hightower to both kickoff and close off the first day of PlatformCon. With a fireside chat that stirred up a storm with a contentious discussion on the importance of silos, and generated this epic Kelsey Hightower quote:
“I will be honest with you and I always get in trouble for this but I actually think Silos are fantastic. Silos are beautiful, especially if you put a well-made API in between them and people are like “no, no, you are not telling the truth”. But if you go to the airport, you don’t want the airline to shift left anything. I don’t want to fly the plane, I don’t want to clean the plane, I don’t want to fuel the plane, I don’t want to load luggage on the plane, I just want to use the app, express where I want to go, you tell me the cost, where I sit and you do what you do. Airlines do what they do. There is a ton of infrastructure and physics involved in keeping the plane in the air and landing safely. I don’t want to do this, I am a passenger.”Â
Kelsey and Kaspar then closed off the first day of PlatformCon with a live Q&A on all things platform engineering that also couldn’t help but get quite heated in the comment section.
It’s commodification time
As a great follow-up on Kelsey’s airport analogy, in his talk Platform engineering is not about platforms our CTO Chris Stephenson explains how software engineering is still stuck in its master craftsman phase, and how platform engineering is the crucial step forward towards more abstracted and automated systems.
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As a great companion piece to Gregor Hohpe’s excellent talk, Platforms = (Architecture + DDD + Automation) x Wholesale, Chris breaks down how Platforms provide a reliable way to achieve objectives and to help deliver commodity services efficiently in the same vein as petrol stations for cars or supermarkets for groceries.
Score - a code-based abstraction layer
It wouldn’t be PlatformCon if we didn’t highlight our open-source building block Score, which we are very proud to share that just a few days after PlatformCon, passed the final vote for being accepted as a Sandbox Project under the CNCF umbrella.
Score is a developer-centric and platform-agnostic workload specification that enables a shared code-based developer experience across all kinds of environments and underlying technologies. If you want to understand what Score is, and its incredible value. You can look no further than Score Product Manager, Susanne Tünker, and Score Contributor, Ben Meier’s talk Bridging the gap between local and remote environments in your platform. It breaks down what Score is, how it works, and how it enables the exact commodification and “siloing” discussed by Chris and Kelsey Hightower above.
A perfect example of this is Matthieu Benoit’s talk, Dapr + Score: Crafting and improving your developer's experience which demoed how to simplify the Developer Experience and avoid dealing with Kubernetes manifests and instead simply use Score, as an abstracting workload specification. While, at the same time, standardizing and shifting down to the Platform, the technical details, the implementation of Dapr, and the associated infrastructure.
You can also find a great example of the usefulness of Score in the talk by Paul Revello, Staff Cloud Solutions Architect focused on Platforms.Â
Score has grown so much in just the short time since it was first launched. And with the CNCF accepting Score as a Sandbox Project, we can’t wait to see how much it will continue to grow and evolve from here.
The rise of Infrastructure Platform Engineering
If you have been following us for a while, you probably know that the platform engineering industry has tended to over-optimize on Developer Experience, without adequate consideration for how this might impact the wider engineering organization, specifically, your infrastructure teams.
The rapid growth (and subsequent decline) last year of Developer Portals as the front end of your platform is a perfect example of this. As our CEO Kaspar von Grünberg excellently broke down in his talk, You’re forgetting Infrastructure Platform Engineering… You shouldn’t, too many organizations are forgetting about the impact on Infrastructure teams on their hastily implemented developer portals.
It’s important to remember that every resource rapidly spun up by your developers through their shiny new portal is a resource that your Infrastructure team will have to maintain.
Does that mean developer self-service isn’t possible? My PlatformCon talk, Platform Orchestrator: The platform engineering game changer to answer that.
I wasn’t alone in showcasing how platform orchestrations can solve this problem. Daniel Bryant had an excellent breakdown of how Platform Orchestrators act as the missing middle between DevEx and Infrastructure/Operations (I/O).
To go even deeper on this topic, our platform architect Clemens JĂĽtte (who will run the first-ever official platform engineering course with me) dove deep into the technical details of this in his hands-on platform engineering workshop, Best practices in infrastructure platform engineering.
From Kaspar’s breakdown to Clemens's deep dive, we wanted to make sure that everyone at PlatformCon understood just how important Infrastructure is to platform engineering. And though there is a lot of great stuff that can happen with and for developers, we can’t forget that platform engineering is a multi-player game.
How to get started?
We’re strong believers that there is no better way to get started in platform engineering than with our open-source reference architectures, and PlatformCon 2024 went a long way toward proving this.
Our open-source reference architectures were first launched last year at PlatformCon, and since then have taken the industry by storm. With no less than 15% of all PlatformCon talks featuring a reference… to our reference architectures!
Whether it was Paul Revello from Google showcasing how Score and Humanitec’s Platform Orchestrator enables an enterprise-grade Internal Developer Platform on GCP or the reference architectures from Bechtle and Code Centric.
We also saw Raffaele Spazzoli, Senior Principal Architect, at Red Hat showcasing the recently open-sourced reference architecture for an Internal Developer Platform on Red Hat OpenShift.
It’s not just our open-source reference architectures, however, that makes getting started so easy. Our Director of Customer Success, Mallory Haigh’s talk, Minimum Viable Platform: A proven success framework to kick off your platform engineering initiative is an absolutely crucial resource in helping make sure your platform journey starts right.
You can get started right away by talking to one of our platform architects or joining the Humanitec Minimum Viable Platform program. You can also join Mallory’s recurring MVP webinars here.
