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Platform engineering has become a hot topic over the last several years. Although Netflix, Spotify, and Google may have led the way by focusing on building platforms, creating "golden paths" and cultivating developer experience over the last decade, many organisations are now intentionally building internal developer platforms to follow suite. The need to deliver software with speed, safety, and efficiency has driven the rise of platforms designed "as a product" with the internal customer, the developer, front and centre.
In this InfoQ emag, we aim to inspire and guide platform engineers into building effective platforms and delivering exceptional developer experience.
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This eMag includes:
- "Curating Developer Experience: Practical Insights from Building a Platform Team" by Andy Burgin. Developer experience (DevEx) goes beyond simple productivity and encompasses aspects of a platform like ease of use, collaboration, and user empathy. Burgin argues software delivery issues are "often a people problem, not a tooling problem". Platforms must help developers "shift left" and genuinely empower them rather than becoming a burden or unused shelfware.
- "The Three As of Building A+ Platforms: Acceleration, Autonomy, and Accountability" by Smruti Patel. Platform engineering is about systems of systems – starting from the very purpose and the "why" for its existence, to the people that build it, operate it, use it, and the ecosystem that consumes, enhances and leverages it. Patel argues that a successful platform makes developers and other users highly autonomous. Platform engineers must be intentional about what the platform offers and make it easy to do what is right and hard to do what is wrong.
- "Building Better Platforms with Empathy" by David Stenglein. Engineers should build their "platform as a product" to promote a customer-centric approach. Stenglein states that internal users often have choices and may resort to shadow IT if the platform doesn't meet their needs. Building a culture of empathy, modeled through open communication and active listening, empowers platform builders to understand the user's true needs and fosters leadership from all levels of the organisation.
- "Platform as a Runtime - the Next Step in Platform Engineering" by Aviran Mordo. Platforms promote organisational scalability by fostering standardised development practices; for example, consistency is ensured across teams by codifying methodologies, tools, and best practices. Progressing to a “platform as a runtime” has allowed Wix to reduce their microservices resource footprint and manage a single platform version with its own lifecycle, separate from the application lifecycle.
- "Virtual Panel: Delivering Great Developer Experiences with Platform Engineering" hosted by Ben Linders with panelists: Aviran Mordo, Jemma Hussein Allen, Ana Petkovska and Andy Burgin. Platforms should allow developers to focus and spend more time coding business logic and product features instead of writing infrastructure components and implementing non-functional requirements. The panel suggest working closely with developers to build something that helps them do their work better and measuring the impact via developer surveys, adoption velocity, and metrics from DORA.
InfoQ eMags are professionally designed, downloadable collections of popular InfoQ content - articles, interviews, presentations, and research - covering the latest software development technologies, trends, and topics.
We hope you find value in the articles and resources in this eMag and are inspired by the practical solutions provided by the authors. We would love to receive your feedback via editors@infoq.com about this eMag.