Gartner is telling you platform engineering is a big deal. They’ve had it on the Hype Cycle and in their top ten trends to watch back-to-back for years now. Everyone you meet at KubeCon or AWS Re:Invent says they are looking at it and are designing their Internal Developer Platform (IDP). You sign up for PlatformCon and realize there are 35k other practitioners who are checking it out.
So is it a big deal? Yes. Building an IDP can have a huge positive impact on the performance of your engineering organization. Yet, for some reason, you and your teams keep postponing doing it for real. Why?
Because you don’t know how to get started. Platform engineering and Platform Orchestrators are new, and this means most organizations still haven’t figured out the best way to buy and roll out these solutions.
The impact of a successful IDP implementation might be huge, but that doesn’t mean that the lift to roll out the platform has to be equally massive and daunting. In fact, the vast majority of platform engineering initiatives fail not because of technology (never the case, actually), but because platform teams don’t manage to get buy-in and cannot get started. They think they need to design everything and have every piece in place before they get going. And that’s how you end up losing momentum, before you know it your platform has died before it was even born.
Get started the right way
What do successful platform engineering initiatives have in common? They start small. They select what we call a pioneering group. This is a group of stakeholders who become your lighthouse team, the same people who were the first to adopt containers or Kubernentes or Terraform.
The platform team starts small by working with the pioneering group. They wire up the Platform Orchestrator to their infrastructure and typically in two weeks they’re already deploying their first application to a production-grade environment.
Application developers can immediately play around with Score, describing what they need in an abstract and intuitive way. This is very similar to the YAML files they are familiar with, but much more powerful.
The Platform Orchestrator reads their requests, matches them to the templates and rules set by the platform team, and deploys the app with the required resources. The platform and security teams can already see how easily RBAC and governance policies are enforced across teams and workflows.
The portal gives your architects, your Centre of Cloud Excellence (CCOE), and your executives a clear picture of the health of your infrastructure and services. They can see at a glance where performance can be improved or where costs can be reduced.
This is how you get started and get set up for a successful IDP rollout using Humanitec’s products. In doing so you’ll be able to show value to all relevant stakeholders in two weeks, instead of two years.
And this is why Humanitec starts at only $999 per month for up to 25 developers. So you can quickly prove to yourself and everyone else in your org that it’s what makes sense for your platform engineering initiative (which now is finally underway!). All you need to get started is a company card, the first 30 days are free and you can cancel anytime. You can then gradually expand to more teams, as they become ready.
What’s next?
Humanitec is the market leader in platform engineering. We can provide you with the most mature enterprise products. We have the know-how, and have developed processes that have been refined by working with 100s of platform teams all over the world. Check out our professional services offering for more information.
Book a call with our Platform Architects for a 1-1 consultation or request a 30-day free trial to get started on your platform engineering journey today.
