A Practical guide
to Platform Engineering
Serg Hospodarets
Author, Speaker. DevOps and Web contributor:
contributed to Terraform, ECMAScript/JS, and Chrome
My path
Platforms Creator
| Title | Managed team size |
|---|---|
| Developer, Tech. Leader | ~10 |
| Architect, Eng. Manager | ~20 |
| Director of Engineering | 50+ |
| VP, Global Head of Eng. | 100+ |
What problems did we need to solve
and Why Platform Engineering?
What we had
🏦 What we wanted
| Organization | Main request |
|---|---|
| 💰 Finance (CFO) | Cost efficiency |
| Product (CPO) | ⏰ Time to market |
| 🔐 Security (CIO) | - security checks - fast security fixes |
| Leaders, CPeopleO | - more common and modern tech stack |
| COO | 📊 Be ready for M&A |
| Board, CEO | Fast results and future projection |
| 🏛 Architects | Common architecture |
| Eng. and Operations | Less cognitive load |
- up to 20 days of downtime per year
- 1 day MTTR
- 124 different Vendors, 30% of infra cost reduction hard request
- Ad hoc and per project security checks and fixes rollout
- Prod deployments once per a month
How do we apply DevOps?
What about
Organizational
structure?
Platform
Engineering
promised to
resolve both...
1. Way to apply DevOps principles in practice in large orgs.
2. Helps to enable Team Topologies
How to create Platform Engineering org?
(details and demo)
First step- simple static docs:
- Docusaurus- create simple versioned doc sites
- Slate- simple static docs for API
Next step:
- Backstage- open-source Internal Development Portal
For scale:
1. Tooling Demo: Engineering Portal
Platform stage at this point: Childhood
Typical team structure
Development
Platform
overview
2. Tooling Demo: Front-End
- Storybook - Frontend workshop for UI development (React, Vue, Angular, JS)
- Create React apps self-service - Provide own app templates
- Customize app config - own app configs
Next steps- move fast and bring the business value ASAP
Use AI to speed-up development:
Warp AI, at your command
3. Tooling Demo: Configurable Microservices/Apps self-service
Create a microservice [optionally, with microfrontend]
- https://www.jhipster.tech/creating-an-app/ (CLI)
- https://start.jhipster.tech/generate-application (Web-based)
Other:
- Provide own application templates in Jhipster
- Create own app templates in Backstage
Platform stage at this point: Adoléscence
Typical team structure
Development
Platform
overview
Next Platform steps
- Provide common artifacts and container solutions
- Environments
- Common Observability
- Upgradability
- Introduce common Security and Quality checks
etc.
List of platform tooling 👉
Platform stage at this point: Maturity
Typical team structure
Development
Platform
overview
4. Tooling: Upgradability
- Use for automated rollout of new features and versions across Platform customers
Front-End: Codeshift / Codemods
Microservices, apps and infra: JHipster Upgrading application
Dependencies: Renovate- multi-platform and multi-language.
What was achieved
| Area | Outcome |
|---|---|
| Platform-based tech. | 50+ apps 100+ microservices, 20+ microfrontends |
| 📝 DORA metrics | MTTR decreased from 1 day to 4 hours Availability went from 95% (20 days down) to 99.999% (5 min/year) |
| ⏰ Time to market | Once per month prod deployments ➡️ to daily deployments and weekly releases. |
| 🔐 Security checks - fast security fixes |
Applied Common Platform security guardrails (shared CI/CD) Supply chain fixes delivered in ~3 hours to prod across portfolio |
| Other Metrics | Time to onboarding decreased 2.3 times eNPS score improved for +12 |
Tips from experience
- Pilot team(s) is super important to become evangelists
- Treat Platform as a product:
1. Internal teams are your customers: provide support, Slack etc. channels
2. Invest in Platform PM and DevX culture
3. Evangelise- regular releases, demos, newsletters
- For UI adoption put heads together with the UX, infra- DevOps, security- SecOps
- Cooperate with Architects/Directors/VP/CXO across the org
- Jackpot Platform strategy- find a way and deliver your platform to your company customers
Inspirational 🗣
- Prefer golden path over golden cage
- Foster the Pull vs Push culture
- Work with leadership for a top-down support for bottom-up enablement
THANK YOU!
Serg Hospodarets
ㅤ