Hey,
It’s podcast month for me – I’m literally recording one or more a week! I had lots of interesting conversations with Nigel Kersten and the folks at Puppet and Heather at The New Stack. We’re talking about Platform Engineering, where it’s going and why you need to start with it now.
One thing that I hear over and over again is “we want to do platform engineering because we want to enable developer self-service.” I’ve been saying this myself for years, but I think this term may not convey the full depth of what platform engineering actually means.
A common misconception is that developer self-service refers to a certain life-cycle stage of a service or resource, namely its start. People think they should focus on making it easy to clone templates or spin up a database without having to deal with Terraform. This is a part of it. But I would argue it is a small part. Ask yourself this: How often do you spin up a new service or database? Not very often in the grand scheme of things. The juicy return on investment of self-service lies in the remaining parts of the service, app or resource lifecycle. This includes: making it really simple for a new developer coming in to understand what belongs where, enabling clear and separated progression between environments, updating env variables effectively, updating resource configurations easily, ensuring security without taking freedom, and making it super easy to debug deployments, surface error messages, and consolidate logs. All this gets better through self-service!
The key to nailing continuous self-service alongside the entire lifecycle of resources is Dynamic Configuration Management (DCM). Dynamic Configuration Management is a methodology to structure the configuration of compute workloads. DCM enables you to dynamically create configuration and dependent resources contextually when you deploy workloads. This means that the configuration is generated automatically based on the environment. This frees developers from having to define or maintain any environment specific configuration for their workloads. It also lifts the burden from developers having to create, configure and maintain infrastructure resources
My colleague Drew is giving a fantastic presentation on this on Feb 7th. I’ll be there and I hope to see you!
Also, we’re still looking for practitioner talks for this year’s PlatformCon. You can share your platform engineering stories and best practices with an audience of 15k+ community members around the world. Last year, we heard from platform leaders like Cloud Strategy Author Gregor Hohpe and OpenCredo CEO/CTO Nicki Watt. PlatformCon 2023 promises to be bigger and better. I can’t wait to see what the community comes up with this year. Submit your talk now!
Best
K
