Platform Engineering

Chapter 1. Why Platform Engineering Is Becoming Essential

She swallowed the cat to catch the bird, she swallowed the bird to catch the spider, she swallowed the spider to catch the fly; I don’t know why she swallowed a fly—Perhaps she’ll die!

Nursery rhyme

Over the past 25 years, software organizations have experienced a problem: what to do with all of the code, tools, and infrastructure that is shared among multiple teams? In reaching for a solution, most have tried creating central teams to take responsibility for these shared demands. Unfortunately, in most cases this has not worked particularly well. Common criticisms have been that central teams provide offerings that are hard to use, they ignore customer needs in favor of their own priorities, their systems aren’t stable enough, and sometimes all of the above.

Instead of fixing these central teams, some have tried getting rid of them entirely, giving each application team access to the cloud and their choice of open source software (OSS). However, this exposes those application teams to the operational and maintenance complexity of their choices, so instead of creating efficiencies and economies of scale, even small teams end up needing site reliability engineering and DevOps specialists. And even with these dedicated specialists, the cost of managing the complexity continues to threaten the productivity of the application teams.

Others, while embracing the best of the cloud and OSS, have not given up on central teams; ...