Hey,
I was in Las Vegas for reInvent and we did a roundtable with our friends at Thoughtworks and Gitlab; I had a few amazing conversations with fellow platform engineers. Many on PlatformCon and the platform engineering certification course. But one conversation stood out in particular:Â
Boyan Dimitrov, the CTO of Sixt, walked me through their platform. And that was electrifying and gave me a sense why we’re doing this. They have been building this platform for 10 years. Anything they create is pumped through this platform. If you want to ship code and build something at Sixt you go through this platform. Boyan highlighted that this platform is a key driver why they are technologically at the forefront in their industry. Only 40 platform engineers serve their Tech organisation of over 800. That’s right! No further operations, or dozens siloed functions etc; 40 amazing PEs, that’s 5% of the whole org. Insane! Through high standardization and automation they are capable of pumping out code like few other teams.Â
Here’s what I think characterizes them:Â
- Boyan is a strong, technical leader. Although the CTO he is a skilled engineer.Â
- Sixt understands that streamlined standardization is more important than free-for-all handling of cloud infrastructure accounts and having developers have their fun with them. Discipline matters deeply.Â
- Executives understand that reducing tooling fragmentation and cognitive load allows the engineers to focus on customer problems and ship faster. They trust the technical management to go all in on this.Â
Now let me make a little prediction: we’re in the middle of hard-core industrialization of software development. Platforms are like digital factories, highly structured, and highly automated. Sure, some teams can continue working in little artisanal workshops for some years to come. But they will be outperformed by the Boyan’s of this world to a breathtaking degree. There will be weavers revolts and I’m sure I will get some angry reactions to this mail. But platform engineering is the future and nobody will stop this future.Â
Before I let you go into your well deserved holidays I wanted to thank the top 2,000 most engaged newsletter readers who helped me with a quick survey last week. Here’s what we found: 63% have a platform engineering mandate, over 55% report directly to the SVP level, 39% directly to the CTO (that’s interesting); and 45% of respondents had 500 or more developers. I was also delighted to hear that Komati is “doing good” as he shared in response to the question “Anything else you want to share with us”.Â
What am I doing with this information? Well, I’m helping to work on a new stream of products. If you’re interested in providing feedback, becoming an early test user, or just talking, let me know.Â
And with that, another tumultuous year is coming to an end. One of my favourite books is Wolfgang Leonhards “Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder” which is sadly translated into english with “Child of the revolution” which is a very lame title. Anyhow, it looks back at how it felt to be in a revolution. If it comes to Platform Engineering you don’t need to read a book, just come to a PlatformCon Live Day next year and you can live it.Â
Or if you want to get hands-on in the new year. There is still time to join the January platform engineering Fundamentals course. In this time of year of using up learning budgets, and new years resolutions - there is no better time to become a certified platform engineer and rock this revolution with us.
And with that, dear friends, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year
Kaspar Lex Platforma Friedman
