Newsletters

Teams have now realized that endless planning of a large scale IDP that covers every edge case does not lead to success.

I spend a gigantic amount of time observing platform teams, initiatives, and the industry as a whole.

A lot of the debates of “how do I standardize”, “how do I avoid abstracting my users too much”, “how do I ensure security” are at its core debates about how you structure repositories. 

The annual “trooping the colors'' for our industry is that time when Gartner publishes their hype cycles and quadrants. It is crazy to see the incredible number of cycles that Platform Engineering is on this year.

It is the exact kind of beginning to end journey on what you need to do and understand as a platform engineer that this industry desperately needs.

Score by Humanitec is now a CNCF Sandbox project! It standardizes workload specs for seamless platform integration, promoting open-source and industry standards.

Let’s do a slightly more technical newsletter this time.

My son caught a mouse yesterday.

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 recently wrote that one of the biggest misconceptions in platform engineering is that it should be single mindedly focused on the developer side of things.

It is clear now how to approach platform engineering.

I’ve just returned from Las Vegas where I had several fascinating conversations with fellow Platform Engineers.

I have been talking about platform engineering for a long time now. I was talking about it 4 years ago when most people looked at me confused and likely began to tune me out.

Across dozens of conversations in the last few months, one thing is becoming clear… a good number of portal implementations fail.

I’m usually super careful how I talk about competition or other vendors in general.

It’s 2024 now, and that means it’s time to stop wasting time and start platform engineering properly.

I remember the afternoon five years ago when we were sitting in a small office in Berlin. It was raining.

I’ve been waiting for this day for a looooong time! I always thought “what if you could run a script and have a fully integrated Internal Developer Platform running?

So, you want to build an IDP and drive platform engineering in your organization. But how do you get your managers on board?

Being an expert in something is such a wonderful thing. I mean, to be able to truly master something.

We’re all back from vacation and ready to get stuck in. Let’s go.

The biggest misconception in platform engineering is that it’s mostly about providing visibility. This is a secondary focus at best. It feels tempting because providing visibility seems like a quick fix and it means your managers can “touch” something. But this rarely provides a return on investment. There are several terrific articles out there like “build your house first, not the front door” or “if you put a pane of glass on a pile of sh’t you observe a pile of sh’it”. So I’ll leave you with that. 

Hope you enjoyed PlatformCon 2023! 22,000 people attended, what a number. I particularly enjoyed the presentation by Stephan Schneider and Mike Gatto on Platform as Code. They showcased their Internal Developer Platform (IDP) reference architecture that they packaged as code and for me, three things jumped out.

I’m sure you’re looking forward to next week’s PlatformCon as much as I am. It really is the event of the year! We’ve been blown away by the hundreds of proposals we’ve received, from which we’ve carefully selected 150+ talks from the best practitioners out there. Here’s a little more info to get you excited :) 

Ultimately, platform engineering is about designing golden paths and providing interfaces for developers to consume. But if we ask 10 platform engineers to describe a golden path, the chances are we’ll likely get the same answer: “It’s when a developer uses the scaffolding workflow in a portal, a template gets cloned, and we have a highly standardized new microservice with a database etc.”. 

What is an Internal Developer Platform? What are the best practices for architecting them? What do you call the different layers/planes? What are golden paths? Time to become more concrete. 

A few years back, I spent a good amount of time guessing trends. Where are we with containerization? Is serverless usage sustainably picking up? I just couldn’t find the right data. So pretty early on, we started to use the power and reach of our community to gather that data ourselves. ‍Since then, it has almost become an institution. The new DevOps Benchmarking study is out, and it’s really worth checking out.

Many think that a golden path is paved if a developer can use a CLI which calls a Terraform file to create an S3 bucket. That’s short sighted.

Self-service is king, golden paths are king. And platform engineering is king. The fact is that most of the current DevOps setups are broken, and need to be rebuilt.

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.

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.

In my last and final newsletter for this year I want to say “thank you” and convey exactly one message: get ready to go all in on Platform Engineering in 2023, this will be career defining for you.

Since the last time I wrote to you, the Score spec we open sourced has seen an impressive uptake in interest by the community. To give you a feeling: the number of people starring the repo has grown 1240% in the last 14 days. This graph shows it quite astoundingly.

I have the pleasure to work with clients from Mumbai to San Francisco and from Oslo to Cape Town. And this has recently provided me with telling insights about how their companies are planning to react to the upcoming crisis.

We just open sourced Score, a workload specification that allows developers to describe the relationship between workloads and dependent resources in a declarative, environment agnostic way. We've used Score for years and realized that, with more collaboration, it has the potential to help the entire developer community...

Hope you’re stable in a world that is increasingly tumultuous. Let's spend a second on an interesting topic to distract ourselves from the earthly problems around us: abstractions! Such a loaded term. On one hand, it’s apparent that “moving up” or increasing the amount of abstraction drives standardization and often increases productivity and ROI for the business...

I get so many questions about what we’re currently focussing on from a product perspective at Humanitec. I thought I’d highlight some of our strategic thinking around how we invest in the Platform Orchestrator from a product perspective. Let me start by giving you a feeling of scale...

It’s now official: platform engineering is on the Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies starting in 2022! Gartner defines platform engineering as “the discipline of building and operating self-service Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) for software delivery and life cycle management”...

Question of the week, can you buy an Internal Developer Platform? No, you can not! An out-of-the-box IDP is called PaaS. If that is what you want (and there are a TON of good reasons for PaaS), you should look at Heroku, Netlify, Render and friends! So if you cannot buy an Internal Developer Platform, what is it?

I’ll allow myself a little bit of self-advertisement. I recently wrote an article I’m really proud of about Dynamic Configuration Management. Something I’m irrationally excited about...

Allow me a brief thought-experiment at this point and reverse that question into “when do we not need a platform?”. And the answer is pretty simple: if all you optimize for is deploying something against an infrastructure that already exists, if all you care about is a simple git-push-deploy flow, you certainly do not need a platform...

I’m just returning from Kubecon. It was simply amazing to meet so many of you in person. You actually exist, breathtaking! So many inspiring conversations with so many of you. From fellow colleagues building other parts of the developer toolchain, to users and implementing specialists...

In my last email I highlighted a possible scenario you might be confronted with if you go cloud-native and you don’t watch out for common traps. In this mail, I want to share a few practices that I observe other teams use to mitigate such potential downsides...

Just because I’ve seen this transition happen so often, I thought I’d jot down for you what it normally looks like. If you’re working in a large enterprise, this is a pattern that can cost you lots of energy at best and your job at worst...

I can hardly believe it but it’s actually coming true. On June 09/10 the first-ever, 100% virtual PlatformCon will take place...

I find it hard to express what I feel these days. Seeing the customers and friends we worked with just a week ago now fighting Russian tanks is simply heartbreaking. It’s definitely the wrong time to write fluffy texts on developer productivity. My thoughts and prayers are with all of you in Ukraine fighting for freedom or fleeing the terror of this idiot. If there is anything in the world we can do for you, reach out...

Almost all organizations I see embarking on the platform engineering journey fall into the same traps. They find their way through them eventually, but I think we can save quite a bit of time by sharing these fallacies with everyone. So I started to jot them down...

A question I get a lot, and a good one: how do developers use Internal Developer Platforms on a day-to-day basis? What does it do for them? Does it restrict them? To be honest, I figured it’s nonsense for you to listen to me, so I asked...

Here we are, another year of uncertainty and changing landscapes. Time to focus on what matters most: community! Specifically, looking at our job serving and enabling the global platform engineering community, our users. You, dear user, are making the Platform Engineering meetups across the globe a hotspot for content...

You’re most likely flooded with emails and stuff to do before the year closes. So I’ll keep it brief. I just wanted to say “thank you” for all we’ve achieved together around platform engineering this year. We’re making great progress on our journey debugging DevOps and enabling self-service for all engineering teams out there...

If there is one thing I love about our technical architecture at Humanitec, it’s the way we handle resources. I can praise this because I’m definitely not the brain behind it. Every single one of my brilliant colleagues in engineering is behind it. They’ve developed something that few yet understand the full beauty of...

this letter is a little bit like the paradox of Epimenides: “Epimenides the Cretan says all Cretans lie”. Mapped to this mail we would need to rephrase it to “DevOps-Content-Kaspar claims all DevOps content is biased”. It’s 2021, what is truth but an illusion...

Somebody recently told me IDPs are an anti-pattern to DevOps because they restrict developers. Good indication this person lives in Berlin and is the usual five years behind the curve (heard of infrastructure as code? Such a trend!). Also that he doesn’t know that good platforms provide the right level of abstraction for the individual contributor...

If you know me, you’re aware that I’m not an insane fan of unstructured, free-floating scripts that are created by dozens of different developers with varying preferences for how to express what. This statistical analysis has made quite some buzz for instance. My line of argumentation: if you let an operator sync unstructured stuff...

THIS SUBJECT LINE IS WRONG! It's proof that your CTO has little experience scaling teams and operating at scale. Has she/he previously managed a 20 person Magento shop? We’re living in a vastly complicated world, our applications and operational setups are a testimony of that...

Autumn is upon us- time to come up with another term: shadow operations. Wikipedia doesn’t (yet) define shadow operations as: “an unofficial operations team consisting of senior engineers and Linux-lovers, who tend to form within companies that get DevOps wrong.” Wrong in what way?...

It’s funny that we’re all building delivery setups that work if we don’t change anything. Everything is freshly scripted into some CI/CD pipeline. There’s even Terraform spinning up stuff (so 2021). Developers do a simple git-push and the image ends up in a namespace. That’s amazing. Until it’s not...

I just wanted to use the chance to briefly point you at some cool things we’ve recently published - I thought this might help you on your platform journey (alongside platform pioneers at over 7,000 companies we have the pleasure of serving). Many have been asking for real-life case studies and reference architectures of teams that have built Internal Developer Platforms...

We probably agree that “you build it, you run it” is what makes for a good DevOps setup, correct? When we asked 1,856 engineering teams in a recent survey what their version of this paradigm looked like, it turned out that for 78.8 % “you build it, you run it” is more a dream than reality...

I got the following question (or similar at least) twice this month: “Should you tie a developer’s bonus to her performance?” I know some of you have to deal with similar questions so I wanted to share my thoughts on this. And give you some logical gunpowder why I think it sucks...

As you know, we have been talking a lot about Internal Developer Platforms and how teams of all sizes are currently building their own. The trend is accelerating. Companies on four continents (!) power their platform setup with Humanitec now - that’s awesome. What I observed from lots of conversations is that people believe building an IDP is difficult and takes a lot of time. That’s not the reality, it’s actually super fast...

I hope you’re doing well and are spending a wonderful summer with your loved ones! While you’re on the beach sipping from an artificial coconut, we’ve received the latest insights on the State of DevOps 2021. Our friends at Puppet and Team Topologies have found some super interesting nuggets. Here’s a sneak peek...

I love Infrastructure as Code. I can not imagine a world without it. The way it allows for higher speed, better disaster recovery, scalability, standardization, security, documentation, and the list goes on. IaC has lots of similarities to configuration as code, it also has similar downsides...

The risk of misalignment between business objectives and the various players in your IT team becomes particularly apparent when it comes to technologies like Kubernetes. The business wants speed. Engineers want beautifully crafted, self-scripted toolchains and shiny K8s CRD operators...

The 2020s are about simplification. We’ll all be cloud-native, time to figure this one out. Yes, there will be a bunch of serverless flavors coming in, we’ll treat those functions as nano-services, quite similar to micro-services from a tooling perspective. There will be more “low-code”, but I tend to think things are consolidating...

Personally, a never-ending source of energy are all the people reaching out to us that love our product, that love Internal Developer Platforms. I had a great chat with Aaron Erickson, who built the developer platform over at Salesforce. It was cool to share our mutual “irrational excitement” that I observe as a typical pattern in those that have experienced teams with well set up IDPs. You simply know that it’s worth fighting for and making that stuff available to all other teams...

If you do not act on your DevOps setup, your DevOps setup will act on you. Markus Schünemann, a clever chap, realized that when Lano started to grow like hell. Thankfully he did so early enough. As you surpass 15 developers, things usually get complex and ugly quite fast. Your toolchain gets more complex and your team ends up needing 11 different tools to keep an app up and running...

Lockdown, there will be no lockdown, bam, bam... Just a little rap song my 3-year old son keeps singing. I thought it helps keep the head high. If you are thinking about leveling up your engineering team’s productivity, chances are you are considering building an internal platform team. If not, well you should. I am a huge fan of internal platform teams. I believe they are the key to high-performing organizations, they unlock true DevOps and make working in your app development teams truly enjoyable...

“Let’s be more lean so we can ship faster, can you do that for me”? That’s what a manager told a platform engineer I had the pleasure of speaking with yesterday. She loved it. We’re often confronted with impossible expectations from managers and developers alike. Internal tooling can play a vital role in meeting those - if done well. If not however, it can have disastrous outcomes...

I’m super excited about entering into a tech-alliance with Aiven. Ever since I first spoke to Oskari, Aiven’s CEO, I was intrigued by how complementary our offerings are: Humanitec on the application layer and Aiven on the database layer. Our technical alliance provides an entirely new degree of never-before-seen Developer Experience...

Scaling your team alongside Kubernetes is intense. Everything is all over the place. You have to get application configuration management right. You have to make a decision about using Helm, Kustomize, or an Internal Developer Platform? Not to mention resource provisioning, IaaC, permissions management, and environment management. We’ve recently had a great webinar on the topic of “how to scale your team alongside Kubernetes” and jotted down the key learnings from our discussion in this article...

“Our setup is very mature”. I hear that all the time. Great! But what’s that supposed to mean? Is a setup mature if it is cloud-native? If most of your developers are ok with updating the values-section in YAML scripts? If some of your colleagues are using IaaC? I sometimes have the feeling that teams confuse complexity with maturity. You’re not mature if you’re complex. Not true for your personality, neither for your DevOps setup...

I love chatting with teams to understand how they are thinking about optimizing their DevOps setup. I make sure I have at least one conversation with a DevOps team a day. Especially as teams mature, grow or transform, they’re often not sure on how to best professionalize their setup...

Over this last week, there’s been a lot of talk around freedom of thought and expression. This actually sparked an interesting (and very much less political) conversation within our team around DevOps standards and engineers’ freedom...

The year is coming to an end. It’s already boring to say it but it has been quite a ride. The show goes on and apart from all its complexities for us it also was the year during which our category started trending: Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) are being talked about everywhere...

This volume is about an interview with Jason Warner, the CTO of Github. We talked about why they built their own Internal Developer Platform, why you need one too and why this is a new category of tools that had to evolve.

A Kubernetes themed Halloween newsletter with some golden nuggets on the topic around the magical intranet.

This volume of our newsletter is about lock-in, how to avoid it, and a great interview Jan Löffler on how and why they built an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) at Zalando.

The 5th volume of our newsletter deals with a very serious question: GKE, EKS, or AKS? People get religious about it...

This special edition is about Humanitec's partnership with Nuaware! The partnership will support our growth in the EU, and help us create a whole range of new educational material around K8s and Developer Experience. We’re really excited about this one.

After a short summer break, we are back with the Developer Productivity & Experience Newsletter with a piece about the downsides of GitOps by Ádám Sándor, Cloud Native Architect at Container Solutions and some interesting news about our partnership with CircleCI.

In the 2nd volume of our newsletter, you find interesting industry insights about Jenkins and some cool content from us like the 1st Developer Experience Roundtable with Erik Muttersbach and Nigel Simpson.

In this first volume of our newsletter, we detail topics like the future of Kubernetes, the image registry Harbor, InfraApp, and environment management in Kubernetes. Happy reading!