Lessons learned from 7 years of running developer platforms

This talk covers best and worst practices for Platform engineering. The trick is, we didn’t always use this phrase, so we actually have many years of experience to learn from. Who are you? You’re in a DevOps, wait, I mean SRE…nope, scatch that…“platform engineering” team. People are coming at you to get kubernetes up and running and then build some kind of platform on-top of kubernetes. But you just got a build pipeline in place! Getting kubernetes ready for developers may be a new problem, but building and running developer platforms has been going on for at least ten years. This talk will cover the lessons those organizations have learned such as: product managing the platform, attracting and retaining developers, seeding trust and skills, re-skilling existing ops staff, and more. Examples are drawn from organizations like Mercedes-Benz, the US Airforce, large insurance companies and banks, and more.

Take Aways:

- Platform teams product manage the platform, think of developers as customers.

- "Platform Engineering" is a new phrase, and it has valuable momentum. But we have at least 10 years of real world case studies we can benefit from.

- Out of several, the two most important lessons are do more "marketing" than you realize and to start small then seed-to-scale.

- You can start right now by finding your customer's problems (developers): converting desire paths to golden paths; using developer toil audits to find and track progress.