New Ebook: Get Our Free Platform Engineering Guide
It has certainly been the year of platform engineering — at least for me, here at The New Stack. Today, TNS is publishing an ebook I wrote, its first on the topic: “Platform Engineering: What You Need to Know Now.” As far as resources for platform engineering go, I may be biased, but this platform engineering guide deserves a place in your library.
It certainly won’t be the end of what TNS has to say on this hot topic. The burgeoning platform community is rich with stories and lessons to be shared. After all, each platform should be different, a response to your company’s unique culture, goals and technology stack.
The seemingly sudden mainstreaming of this sociotechnical set of practices and tools is a response to several things — the increasingly complex cloud native landscape, tighter budgets, a vibrant Slack community. And, especially, 15 years of challenges in implementing DevOps.
DevOps requires that organizations try to break down silos, but silos often have valid reasons to exist — compliance, security, budgets, legacy technology, separations of responsibility.
While a focus on flow, feedback and experimentation is great, DevOps has actually led to developers being in charge of a whole lot more than delivering value to customers — like cloud computing, cybersecurity and infrastructure.
Platform engineering, on the other hand — as Abigail Bangser, a principal engineer at Syntasso, told me recently — focuses on the friction between those silos.
“Instead of focusing on removing silos, as we historically did, we are now — correctly — focused on the reduction of friction,” she said.
How Platform Engineering Improves Communication
DevOps principles continue to evangelize ownership of a solution through fast feedback loops, but focus only on improving the technical side. Platform engineering also reduces friction across technical and business units and processes.
Whether it’s human-to-human, human-to-computer, or computer-to-computer, sources of friction often come down to communication. When platform engineering is delivered correctly, it acts as a cross-organizational translator. Software development teams feel more connected to business purpose. Business understands what the big engineering cost center is up to. And clear paths forward are established.
Platform engineering focuses on discoverability, extensibility via the developer’s beloved API, and self-service. By establishing what Spotify, the streaming media company, has dubbed “golden paths,” a platform reflects an agreement among technical and business stakeholders, while reducing friction to get that work done.
Inside the New Ebook – Your Guide to Platform Engineering
This free ebook, sponsored by VMware Tanzu, lays the foundation for your platform strategy. It features the advice and experience of dozens of organizations that have gone on this journey, so you can build empathy and understanding with your internal developer customers and build an internal developer platform that actually helps them achieve more with less, faster.
With this guide to platform engineering, you will learn:
- Why platform engineering is on the rise.
- How to focus on culture first.
- The “thinnest viable platform” and how building one can help get your developers onboard quickly.
- The power of the API and self-service.
- The Platform as a Product mindset.
- Platform-enabled security.
- Measuring success.
- How to keep the momentum going.
This platform engineering ebook is for organizations of all sizes looking to create or expand on their platform strategy in a way that truly understands and responds to developer needs, increasing developer productivity and joy.
But don’t take my word for it. Download it now!
