Platform Engineering

Chapter 4. Building Great Platform Teams

It’s not DNS.

There’s no way it’s DNS.

It was DNS.

SSBroski

We start with a quote about DNS because it’s a fundamental system most platforms depend on, and at close to 40 years old it seems it should be well understood by now. Yet, the point of the quote is that DNS still causes complex failures regularly, and it takes expertise not just to debug them, but also to avoid more DNS issues in the future.¹ This is also the challenge with staffing platform teams: by developing abstractions over complex systems, these teams enable productivity for your users, but if they aren’t staffed with experts who understand those systems, they will create operational problems down the road.

We laid out the systems engineer (administrator) versus software engineer (developer) dichotomy in Chapter 1, as we think it is essential to understanding the challenges of not just building a platform engineering team, but creating the right team culture. It’s tempting to insist that building a good team is just a matter of finding people who are skilled at both. And yes, as much as possible, you should seek out engineers who are strong software developers as well as capable of understanding complex systems they didn’t develop. But no one is good at everything, so the way you build great platform teams is by hiring people with diverse strengths and creating a culture where each is enabled to succeed.

In this chapter, we give you the tools to do so. First, we’ll explore ...