Platform Engineering

Preface

A Note from Camille

In 2017, right as my first book was being published, I took a new job as head of platform engineering. This is where I first met Ian, newly moved to NYC from Seattle, where he had spent several years at Amazon and AWS. We were fast allies: two people who found themselves in the situation of helping a group of brilliant engineers turn around their organizational reputation from one of “a team that builds what they think is fun without enough concern for customer needs or stability” to a mature, well-operated, customer-focused platform team.

Over the next couple of years, we laid the groundwork for that turnaround. Ian taught me the value of everything he had learned in his time at Amazon: from writing six-pagers for design and planning to hiring systems engineers to establishing stronger operational practices (as well as injecting a heavy dose of skepticism about user-level networking). I brought in a focus on product management, decisive leadership, goal setting, and general willingness to change things that needed to be changed in pursuit of organizational excellence. Together with the technical, product, management, and operational expertise of the other platform leads, we succeeded in changing the culture of our teams and implementing a lot of the practices you will read about throughout this book.

When Ian left a couple of years later to tackle this challenge in the growth startup world, we stayed in close touch. Ian was (unsurprisingly) a very ...