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How Platform Engineering Works

How Platform Engineering Works

Presented at DevOpsDays in Birmingham, AL - April 20, 2023

The industry as a whole is learning about what it means to be a platform engineer. With this talk I will share my team’s real world story of what it is like to be a platform team. It may be surprising to some that, for a smaller engineering organization, platform engineering is not about “building an internal heroku”. It is about solving specific problems developers have and helping them improve their delivery velocity and application reliability. Through a series of anecdotes from my past year on this team I will share my distilled learnings and paint a clearer picture of what platform teams do day-to-day.

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Chad McElligott

April 20, 2023
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Transcript

  1. 👋 Hi, I’m Chad McElligott • Auction house for luxury

    merchandise • ~2000 employees • ~$8 Billion in Sales in 2022 • ~70 engineers • 4 of us in Platform Engineering Staff Infrastructure Engineer @ Sotheby’s
  2. Platform Engineering is the application of a Product Mindset to

    supporting your engineering organization’s software delivery velocity and system stability.
  3. the speed we move from idea to delivery Velocity Sub-Disciplines

    • Build Engineering • “DevOps” • Developer Experience • Developer Productivity Key Metrics • Lead Time for Changes • Deployment Frequency
  4. a consistent experience Stability the speed we move from idea

    to delivery Velocity Sub-Disciplines • Infrastructure Engineering • “DevSecOps” • Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)? Key Metrics • Change Failure Rate • Mean Time to Recover Sub-Disciplines • Build Engineering • “DevOps” • Developer Experience • Developer Productivity Key Metrics • Lead Time for Changes • Deployment Frequency
  5. Summary Four Product Mindset tenets for Platform Engineering: 1. Set

    goals on outcomes, not outputs 2. Truly know your customer(s) and their needs 3. Invent on behalf of your customer, don’t just working reactively 4. Scale your impact by investing time/$$$ wisely and managing toil A Product Mindset × (Velocity + Stability) = How ✨Platform Engineering✨ Works