Hey there,
Do you feel the anger crawling up your chest as you are reading those lines? “Silos are amazing” - what’s wrong with him now? I strongly agree with this statement and I think you’ve been told a lie. I recently had an incredibly inspiring conversation with Kelsey Hightower for PlatformCon 2024 and I will just give him the floor in his own words:
“I will be honest with you and I always get in trouble for this but I actually think Silos are fantastic. Silos are beautiful, especially if you put a well made API in between them and people are like “no, no, you are not telling the truth”. But if you go to the airport, you don’t want the airline to shift left anything. I don’t want to fly the plane, I don’t want to clean the plane, I don’t want to fuel the plane, I don’t want to load luggage on the plane, I just want to use the app, express where I want to go, you tell me the cost, where I sit and you do what you do. Airlines do what they do. There is a ton of infrastructure and physics involved in keeping the plane in the air and landing safely. I don’t want to do this, I am a passenger.”
And tying this to platform engineering he continues:
“And look, most people have never met the person that works for your electricity company. You have never met the people that work at the lower levels of your cloud provider and many have probably never met their platform engineers. Why? Because they expose an API with a very clear and consistent contract. I’m not saying you shouldn’t collaborate but you should only collaborate on things you do for the first time. That’s an important difference.”
Lot’s of wisdom right there and it reminds me of a conversation with Jason Warner, the CTO of Github I had a few years ago. Jason said: a team where Dev and Ops have transactional conversations is a failing team. And just to say this again, Kelsey nails it when he emphasizes that collaboration is fine if it’s around things the team has never done before.
If you disagree with Kelsey and me you can debate with us. You can hear our entire conversation at PlatformCon24 and debate with us at the QA session.
Here are a few other things you want to have a look at during PlatformCon:
- platformcon.com/workshops/best-practises-in-infrastructure-platform-engineering
- platformcon.com/workshops/build-a-minimum-viable-platform-in-2-hours
Kaspar
