A newsletter that started as a personal learning and getting-in-touch project by Ivan Krnic grew into a sociotechnical newsletter covering topics of technical excellence, organizational improvements, and productivity.
Platform Engineering
✨”If you don’t build your platform, it will build itself”
–Kaspar von Grünberg
We all have internal development platforms. The question is, are we controlling them, or do we let them control us? Controlling them is what we call Platform Engineering.
Some organizations think they don’t need a platform because they already have all those systems in place. They think they don’t need Platform Engineering because they already do regular system maintenance of those tools.
That reminded me of a recent blog post on effectiveness vs efficiency.
Effectiveness is about doing the right things.
Efficiency is about doing things right.
This is precisely the difference between Platform Engineering and regular system maintenance that many organizations perform.
Platform Engineering focuses on effectiveness – having a vision and converging your efforts to build a platform that would bring more value to its users, in this case, internal teams.
Regular system maintenance focuses on efficiency – keeping yourself busy by “keeping the lights on.” But, because there is no vision to guide you, you never really create new value for your users.
With Platform Engineering, you’re managing a platform.
With regular system maintenance, you’re managing hundreds of independent components.
We all know what brings more value.
Interview of the Month
Platform Engineering with Kaspar von Grünberg
Kaspar von Grünberg is CEO at Humanitec, one of the companies leading the platform engineering space. He’s been involved in platform engineering from the start, practically when the term was invented. A lot is going on recently in this space, particularly around Broadcom acquiring VMWare, and this is just one of the topics Kaspar and I will dig into.
QED 2024 conference
We’re back in Zadar for another QED conference and a bonus conference-within-conference Mighty Mainframe!
Our keynote speakers will be Sam Newman, technologist and best-selling book author, and Rosalind Radcliffe, IBM Fellow, CIO DevSecOps CTO.
Register here and join us!
Handpicked
(Almost) Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years running infrastructure at a startup – This is a fantastic post by Jack Lindamood on infrastructure decisions he made over four years in a startup and whether he regrets them (or not).
Emergent Platform and Evolution in Sociotechnical Systems – Listen to Jabe Bloom talking with Eduardo da Silva about platform questions that everybody has but are rarely discussed.
A visual guide on troubleshooting Kubernetes deployments – Daniele Polencic shared a super useful overview of steps for troubleshooting Kubernetes deployments! And you get extra bonus points for teaching kids Kubernetes through a board game!
Read with us
Platform Strategy: Innovation Through Harmonization
An excellent book by Gregor Hohpe to get you started with platforms and to guide you through most of the challenges you will face on your journey.
