Happy New Year! I hope you had wonderful vacations with your family!
My colleagues pinged me today asking me to include the upcoming PlatformCon 2023 in my newsletter. After 6,000 attendees last year we’re expecting 12,000 this year. I’d love to see you virtually or at one of the in-person events across the world! Sign-up today, it’s free. And submit your talk if you want to share something with the platform engineering community.
As I thought about what I’d love to speak about at PlatformCon, one thing immediately came to mind: standardization by design! I think platform engineering is about two things: developer self-service and standardization by design! A lot of people are talking about developer self-service, and that’s great! But standardization by design is just as important and needs more attention.
It’s super chic to build portals that allow you to create new services or resources. People talk about templating and “freeing the developer”. But this only touches the day 1 operation. How often are you really creating a new service?
Think about all the other days in the lifetime of an application. For those, you need to design golden paths that drive standardization by design – paths that, by just using them, “clean up” your setup and make it easier to maintain.
It makes sense when I write it but we’re not concrete enough about what these paths look like. I will spend a lot of time this year working on reference architectures, tutorials and examples for all of you.
See you
Kaspar
