Delivering on the Promise of DevOps Through Internal Engineering Platforms

As a Platform Engineer, how do you know if you are delivering on the investment in an internal engineering platform? What should be the measures? What does good look like? This workshop is designed to help answer these questions and inspire practitioners to be Thought leaders in building their organizational roadmap for an effective engineering platform.

Goals of an Engineering Platform

• Reduce the time needed to get software-defined experiences in front of customers
• Increase the number of valuable experiences shipped by enabling fast, safe experimentation
• Maintain customer satisfaction through improved resiliency (fewer incidents) and faster recovery from incidents
• Sustain the value of the investment in custom software through improved code quality
• Reduce the security risk profile, providing better protection of customer and corporate data
• Increase the cost efficiency of engineering investments through financial reporting and optimization
• Increase the governance audit compliance, providing better internal protection of shareholder value

How can an Engineering Platform do these things?

• Remove engineering friction (lead time) normally experienced by software developers in building, deploying and operating software by delivering all the capabilities of the engineering platform in the form of a self-serve, “product-like” experience.
• The self-serve EP product features include everything needed for a development team to build, release, and operate their software in a secure and compliant manner
• Build, release, and operate the EP itself entirely in the same software-defined manner as the development teams (internal customers) who use it are expected to ship their software. This results in an EP that is resilient, secure, and capable of rapid, evolutionary change.
• Separate the work of being compliance from the enforcement of compliance through comprehensive point-of-change assessment automation.
• Incorporate real-time financial reporting into the internal capabilities of the platform.
• Tracked, visible, measures and KPIs to establish value and direct the evolution to maintain ROI
• (role of external SaaS integration for individual capabilities)

What does a good Engineering Platform experience look like?

• Onboarding
  • Developer Identity
  • Self organization (team management)
  • Developer tools
  • Documentation
  • Support
• Develop and Release  (apis, uis, etc)
  • CICD Starterkits
  • Service interface to  managed services (RDS, Kafka, storage classes)
  • Broad scope of developer tooling (feature toggles, api standards and documentation, customer contract testing, http authN/Z policy-as-code)
  • E2e provenance and bom
• Incorporated managed services include:
  • Compute
  • Secure persistent data sources
  • Ingress, dynamic routing, e2e secure transit
  • Global/regional locality, multi-cloud (as needed)
  • End-to-end, secure communication and data storage
• Point-of-change governance automation
  • Remove reliance on manual compliance acceptance steps
  • Development teams retain code-level ownership of the ci/cd pipeline code
  • Comprehensive automation of governance (compliance, security, regulator, etc)
• Feedback
  • Product roadmap tightly coupled to internal customer feedback (such as any successful Product ownership will do)