Platform Engineering Done Well

If done well, platform engineering can help organizations to deliver software faster, more reliably, and more securely. However, if existing teams of infrastructure, DevOps, and SRE folks are simply rebranded as platform engineers, things tend to turn out less well. Platform engineering done well requires clearly defined goals, well-aligned incentives, and new organizational practices.

Despite what you've heard, DevOps definitely isn't dead -- neither is infrastructure or SRE -- but a new set of best practices is emerging around platform engineering. Join us at QCon to be part of the discussion on how DevOps should continue to evolve. Remember, you can't spell DevOps without “Dev”, and these folks are the core customers of your platform.

In this track, we will explore the people perspective of platform engineering in addition to the technical aspects. We'll draw on the hard-won experiences of our speakers and learn about what it takes to establish, implement, and maintain a successful platform engineering program.


From this track

Session Platform Engineering

Building a Successful Platform: Acceleration, Autonomy & Accountability

Tuesday Oct 3 / 10:35AM PDT

Do we build a greenfield platform or do we incrementally centralize common foundations? Do we abstract away all complexity or provide upfront knobs and handles for composability?

Speaker image - Smruti Patel

Smruti Patel

VP of Engineering @Apollo Graph

Session Platform Engineering

Understanding Platforms: What They Are, Why They Work, When to Use Them, How to Build Them

Tuesday Oct 3 / 11:45AM PDT

Technical concepts are something that are thought of, approached, and understood differently across engineers, managers, and executives. Bridging the gaps and providing understanding to a complex and nuanced topic across all three groups can sometimes feel impossible.

Speaker image - Hazel Weakly

Hazel Weakly

Head of Infrastructure & Developer Experience; Director, Haskell Foundation; Infrastructure Witch of Hachyderm

Session

Unconference: Platform Engineering Done Well

Tuesday Oct 3 / 01:35PM PDT

What is an unconference? An unconference is a participant-driven meeting. Attendees come together, bringing their challenges and relying on the experience and know-how of their peers for solutions.

Session Platform Engineering

Building Better Platforms with Empathy: Case Studies and Counter-Examples

Tuesday Oct 3 / 02:45PM PDT

Break out of traditional IT roles with your internal platform. Build a product based on customer empathy and real needs to achieve broad adoption.

Speaker image - David Stenglein

David Stenglein

Solo Consultant @Missing Mass, LLC with Over 28 Years in Systems, Software, and Consulting

Session Platform Engineering

Effective Performance Engineering at Twitter-Scale

Tuesday Oct 3 / 03:55PM PDT

Is performance engineering more craft than machinery? How do you scale something that seems to require both domain-specific context and comprehensive knowledge across multiple levels of the software and hardware stack?

Speaker image - Yao Yue

Yao Yue

Platform Engineer, Distributed System Aficionado, Cache Expert, and the Founder of IOP Systems

Session Platform Engineering

How to Get Tech-Debt on the Roadmap

Tuesday Oct 3 / 05:05PM PDT

Only doing product-led work can lead to an unmaintainable system with lots of downtime. Unfortunately, getting time to work on the things that would prevent that can be challenging.

Speaker image - Ben Hartshorne

Ben Hartshorne

Principal Engineer @Honeycomb, Building Operable Systems with Resilience and Business Value

Track Host

Daniel Bryant

Java Champion, Co-author of "Mastering API Architecture", Independent Technical Consultant, and InfoQ News Manager

Daniel Bryant works as an Independent Technical Consultant and is also the News Manager at InfoQ and Emeritus Chair for QCon London. His current technical expertise focuses on ‘DevOps’ tooling, cloud/container platforms and microservice implementations. Daniel is a leader within the London Java Community (LJC), contributes to several open source projects, writes for well-known technical websites such as InfoQ, O'Reilly, and DZone, and regularly presents at international conferences such as QCon, JavaOne, and Devoxx.

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