Hi,
Being an expert in something is such a wonderful thing. I mean, to be able to truly master something. Say you spend 10,000 hours training, and you become an expert in database configurations. Impressive! Terraform is your lifeblood? Perfect. You’re now a true master in React, congratulations to you, my friend.
The idea of the universally trained scholar is a beautiful idea — if you’re living in the roaring 50s of the 17th century and you happen to be Immanuel Kant. Unless there’s something seriously wrong with our mailing lists, you’re probably neither of those.
I’m here to tell you that the idea of having developers manage everything is nonsense. Do one thing well, not many things mediocre. With this in mind, I delivered a webinar last week that I think you’ll want to watch. During the session, I argue why you should introduce more specialization in your teams and have devs solely focus on workload source code and describing workload and dependent resources in an abstract way. In a nutshell, here’s why.
Platform engineering/infra folks focus on writing IaC templates for all common resources. They then write resource definitions. They describe how to resolve the abstract request from the devs to the IaC templates and create app and infra configs dynamically with every single deployment.
This gives app devs an easy way to consume abstraction. You can introduce separation of concerns and reach a high degree of standardization with 95% less config files plus a setup that’s easy to handle.
The golden rule of repo structures in platform engineering: abstract request + context + rules = executable configs. I’m aware this takes a second to sink in, but it will rock your world. If you want to know how to set this up, we’ve created a really cool and interactive workshop that you can sign up for here.
One more thing. We’re running a survey on platform engineering salaries to help shed some light on industry benchmarks and trends. We’d love your opinion. To take part, you can find the study here.
All right, that’s it for today!
Cheers,
Kaspar
