---
title: Building Extensible Platforms
weight: 12
tags:
 - platformengineeringday
 - platform
---

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## Baseline

Complexityis unavoidable: May it be in platforms, physics or biology
Complexity usually grows rappidly followed by a phase of making things better -> "Let's make virtual machines easier but add 500x more of them" (the story of kubernetes)

TODO: Steal chart from slides

## Mthods to the madness

- We want confluence (the mathematical one, not the atlassian one): If there are different paths that are semanticly the same it should not matter wich path we take
  - As long as we achive the same goal the specifics should not matter that much
- Narrow Protocol: A narrow and slowly evolving protocol allows us to have diversification below and above the narrow point
  - Examples: IP Adresses and DNS haven't changed in a long time -> We can use this narrow thing to build monsters on top of
  - Allow everything above and below your platform to change flexibly and evolve
- Vertical integration: When you're getting integrated you become valuable (again the DNS example) -> Vertical integration always beats technological capabilities
- Picking the right protocol might be hard, but choosing a narrow and integrated one helps

TODO: Steal confluence slide

## Extensibility

- The expression Problem: The static typesafety vs type-flexibility question 
- So we want a platform where we can
  - In a typesafe manner
  - onboard new applications into the platform
  - onboard new integrations into the platform
  - Without requiring a end-user or platform migration/deploy
  - Without centralising definition of interfaces or applications
  - Without assuming a certain platform or applicationg architecture
- So basicly: Protocolas are the new platforms
- You have to be fine with people using your protocol for whatever they want -> It needs to be abusable