kubecon26/content/day0/09_hanover.md

title, weight, tags

title	weight	tags
The Day 2 Hangover: What To Do After the Platform Party Ends	9	platformengineeringday platform

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Time to build a platform

• Why? Boss want's that
• How? Who knows
• First: Gather rquirements
• Then: No one actually uses our platform -> The only users were the low value ones and other teams

Why does no one like out platform?

• Requirements are constantly changing so if you take 6 months they need something else/additional -> The platform no longer serves it's users
• Time to delivery is real important -> If you are no longer the bottleneck people actually like you
• Over time your clean catalog slowly grows to become a sprawl of garbage with specialized variations for everything

Why did it fail

• Platforms are treated as a project with achivable end goals
• Building in a slio (accidentally) -> Requirements change and require lots of work and optimization
• You might think that you are your own customer but you are not -> There are many different perspectives involved (DEV, SRE, OPS,. Management, ...)

How can we prevent this fallacies?

• Hire a exdperiences platform product manager (if you can)
• Output over outcome -> Maturity model helps
• Focus on user values like speed, safety, efficiency, scalability
• Find your exempar team instead of trying to build for everone from zero -> Choose an experiment friendly team with high visibility and a good feedback culture
• Adopt tools and practives to make things easier
  • GitOps over imperative pipelines
  • Build shared platform services (undifferentated infra like registries, github runners and stuff like that)
  • Ship observability as early as possible (opptinionated dashbaords and alerts from day 1)
• Make everything self-service
  1. Standardize as platform capabilities
  2. Bundle each capability as an api and associated workflow
  3. Expose the APIs thrugh a pluggable IDP
• Recruit producers (providers) they are experts and allow you to scale your capabilities
• Be the layer that facilitates exchange between producers and consumers

TODO: Steal persona matrix from slides

TL;DR

• Outcome over output
• Find values for all users (with some first citicens as guidelines)
• Everything as a Selfservice
• Recruit producers