Doing Platform Engineering Well

If you want your product engineering teams to be able to deliver a fast flow of business value to their customers, you need them to have a high degree of autonomy. That includes making decisions about the technology they use. 

But there is a problem with this, which is that those teams are making choices that optimize for their needs. Lots of local optimization can leave you with an unsupportable mess of different technologies. It also leaves a gap where there should be global optimization, of the things that matter to the organization as a whole.

You also won't have every skill on every development team, and you don't want every team solving the same problems in potentially different ways, particularly for the problems that aren't core to your business. There are very few businesses where having different continuous integration tooling between one team and the next is a business differentiator!

This is where you need an internal developer platform, providing tools, services, expertise and help. But to do this well, you need a platform team that thinks about their platform as a product, and focuses on what those development teams need.

On this track we will hear about the kinds of developer platforms being built, and what makes them successful.


From this track

Session Platform Engineering

Demystifying Kubernetes Platforms with Backstage

Thursday Jun 15 / 10:35AM EDT

Developer platforms can help developers move faster, be more productive, and focus on delivering value.

Speaker image - Matt Clarke

Matt Clarke

Senior Infrastructure Engineer @ Spotify

Session Infrastructure as Code

How DoorDash Ensures Velocity and Reliability through Policy Automation

Thursday Jun 15 / 11:50AM EDT

Infrastructure-as-code has grown in popularity over the past few years. With this codification, many companies have adopted review processes that keep their infrastructure engineers constantly reviewing code changes and busy with mostly tedious work.

Speaker image - Lin Du

Lin Du

Software Engineer @Doordash

Session Platform Engineering

Hard Problems in Frontend Platforms

Thursday Jun 15 / 01:40PM EDT

Imagine you are tasked with building a platform to support a distributed system where your code executes in a remote environments.

Speaker image - Katie Sylor-Miller

Katie Sylor-Miller

Frontend Architect @Etsy

Session Platform Engineering

Scaling Organizations with Platform Engineering

Thursday Jun 15 / 02:55PM EDT

Engineering organizations are often incentivized to prioritize short-term growth over long-term needs, leading to socio-technical consequences such as tech debt, organization siloes, and attrition.

Speaker image - Lesley Cordero

Lesley Cordero

Staff Engineer @nytimes

Session Platform Engineering

Perils, Pitfalls and Pratfalls of Platform Engineering

Thursday Jun 15 / 04:10PM EDT

Platform engineering isn’t supposed to be just another name for SRE, DevOps, infrastructure, or backend software engineering teams; but if you aren’t careful, that’s what you’ll get.

Speaker image - Charity Majors

Charity Majors

CTO @Honeycombio, Previously engineer & manager @Facebook @Parse & @Linden Lab

Date

Thursday Jun 15 / 10:30AM EDT

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Track Host

Sarah Wells

Independent Consultant and Author

Sarah is a technology leader, consultant and conference speaker with a focus on microservices, engineering enablement, observability and devops. She has over 20 years experience as a developer, principal engineer and tech director across product, platform, SRE and devops teams. She is currently writing a book about microservices, based on her experience of building and operating them for over a decade at the Financial Times.

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