Devops Is Dead
When do you need a Platform team
DevOps is dead 💀, long live Platform Engineering!
— Sid Palas (@sidpalas) July 26, 2022
1) Developers don't like dealing with infra
2) Companies need control of their infra as they grow
Platform Engineering (and Internal Developer Platforms) enable these two facts to coexist. Here's how:
(1/n)
- Treat the Internal Developer Platform as a product!
- Enable self-service!
- Provide structure and standardization!
Sid makes some good points about the developer comfort zone.
My take is that the Cloud that at least AWS/GCP/Azure is certainly uncomfortable.
In an ideal world you could give a developer team an account with managed services like lambda, s3, cloudwatch and dynamodb… and everything else turned off!
That would inevitably provide:
- Self service
- Provide structure and standardization
And a bonus is that you would not need to an Internal Developer Platform, aka “Platform team”.
We don’t live in an ideal world
Inevitably you need to run container workloads and spin up an RDS.
Then you fall down the black hole of complexity that in Kubernetes, the lowest common denominator.
Of course k8s does everything, including spinning up resources like via https://kubevela.io/ or https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/aws-controllers-for-kubernetes-ack/.
It can be done well with Gitops, though inevitably it’s not.
It’s not self service when an App team needs to make a Pull Request / Merge Request.
I don’t think you can call it a Internal Product Team when there is no choice.