Chapter 3. How and When to Get Started
Once upon a time, there were three little pigs. One pig built a house of straw, while the second pig built his house with sticks. They built their houses very quickly and then sang and danced all day because they were lazy. The third little pig worked hard all day and built his house with bricks.
“The Three Little Pigs”
This chapter is targeted at those leaders whose teams are not doing platform engineering yet. (Those who are doing it already can skip straight to Chapter 4). We focus on three specific starting points:
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In the first section, we talk about what it means to do platform engineering at a small startup, where it’s usually best to start by building cooperation around your shared code.
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In the second section, we cover how to handle the transition to a formal platform engineering organization when those initial cooperative mechanisms start to fail.
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In the final section, we cover a different problem that’s typically encountered in older and larger companies: transitioning a traditional infrastructure engineering team into a platform engineering culture.
Sometimes it’s OK to build your platform quickly from straw and sticks and use the extra time to build more important things for the business.1 But it’s good to know when you need to start laying bricks and how to start renovating your old stone castle into something more modern.
Fostering Platform Cooperation at Small Scale
While we have a lot of experience running platform ...
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