Platform Engineering

Part II. Platform Engineering Practices

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for a bird to learn to fly while remaining an egg.

C.S. Lewis

In Part I, we talked about the “why” and the “what” of platform engineering, and we hope to have convinced most of you of the value of doing more of it in your company. But we’re sure that some of you are still skeptical, wondering whether this isn’t just a rebranding of infrastructure engineering, DevOps, and SRE, where the team promises to develop customer-focused products but really just doubles down on operating a bunch of disjoint OSS and vendor systems. Or you might be skeptical for other reasons; perhaps you’ve had the experience of new leaders coming in from an application/product engineering background who think they can solve all the hard problems of scaled platforms with new software, but who have no deep appreciation of what’s involved in operating critical and complex systems.

We’ve lived through these experiences as well, and our goal for Part II is to teach you how to avoid these outcomes, and so break out of the egg, eventually to fly. To do this, we’re going to spend the next eight chapters—the bulk of the book—talking about the “how” of great platform engineering organizations. We’ll start by discussing getting started, choosing the right people, adopting a product mindset, and operating your platform successfully. Then we’ll move on to the more complex work of planning, rearchitecting, ...