I love chatting with teams to understand how they are thinking about optimizing their DevOps setup. I make sure I have at least one conversation with a DevOps team a day. Especially as teams mature, grow or transform, they’re often not sure on how to best professionalize their setup. Time and again you’ll hear questions such as:
- Should we have one DevOps per team or a DevOps group serving all other teams?
- What are internal platform teams and do I need one?
- How does this intersect with SRE teams?
I have formulated a pretty clear-cut opinion on this by now: if you’re 2+ teams and 15+ engineers, I believe DevOps should be your culture, SRE should be a centralized group in org and you should carefully start building an internal platform team. If building an internal platform team is something of interest to you, join us on February 16th: master James Whinn will talk about the Challenges in building and scaling internal platform teams.
Related to this, I also invite you to read the excellent book “Team topologies” by Manuel Pais and Matthew Skelton. It has been a steady source of inspiration for all of us here at Humanitec.
One of the key things internal platform teams can deal with is your multi-cloud setup. Usually a horrible idea, multi-cloud setups are inevitable at times. I’ve seen horrible things and I’ve put together my own “hitchhiker's guide to surviving multi-cloud”. First rule: keep your setup portable. Parameterized environment variables are a way to do that. My friend Jacob Fahrenkrug will join us for a webinar on “Managing Environment Variables in Kubernetes” to discuss that too.
We have some very exciting announcements coming up next week so I might be back with a special edition. Until then, I hope you stay safe and away from mutations of any kind.
Thank you for being here with us.
Kaspar
PS: thank you for all your help with our backend-positions. We filled those in a record time of 23 days after reviewing a three-digit number of applications and accepting below 1% of candidates. This wouldn’t have been possible without you!
