InfoQ Homepage Platform Engineering Content on InfoQ
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Automating Platform Upgrades at eBay
eBay recently provided insights into their adoption of a pipeline-driven automation solution, enabling them to achieve continuous updates to their framework and infrastructure. The solution architecture has the potential to become more versatile as it adopts a pluggable and loosely coupled approach, allowing for easier extensibility.
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Amazon CodeCatalyst Moves to GA with Amazon CodeWhisperer Support
Amazon moved CodeCatalyst into full general availability with a number of new features. CodeCatalyst provides templates to streamline creating the project's infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, development environments, and issue management system. New features with the GA release include better support for GitHub repos, integration with Amazon CodeWhisperer, and support for AWS Graviton processors.
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Platform Engineering Challenges: Small Teams, Build Versus Buy, and Building the Wrong Thing
The team at Syntasso wrote a series of blog posts outlining twelve challenges that platform teams face. These challenges include having a small platform team support a large organization, failing to understand the needs of the platform users, and struggling with the build-vs-buy argument.
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How Palo Alto Approaches Platform Engineering
Ramesh Nampelly, senior director of cloud infrastructure and platform engineering at Palo Alto, recently wrote about how Palo Alto approaches platform engineering. They built their own internal developer platform (IDP) based on the open-source tool Backstage. Their platform covers infrastructure provisioning, policy management, observability, and cost management.
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State of DevOps Report Finds Platform Teams Lacking Product Management Support
Puppet released the 2023 State of DevOps Report with a focus on Platform Engineering. The report found that organizations with platform engineering teams report increased developer velocity, improvements in system reliability, greater productivity, and better workflow standards. Organizations still need to work on adopting a product mindset with the platform teams.
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Internal Platform Framework Kratix Releases Community Marketplace
Kratix, an open-source framework for building internal platforms, has released a marketplace of community-provided Promises. Within Kratix, Promises represent components curated by the platform team that application teams can request. The Kratix Marketplace is open for submissions from the community.
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Spotify Releases Enterprise Plugin Bundle for Backstage
Spotify has released five plugins for Backstage as a purchasable bundle. The five plugins cover a variety of use cases including compliance, access control, employee education and satisfaction, and usage metrics. The plugins are a mix of existing Spotify tooling and new development specifically for this bundle.
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Platform Engineering, DevOps, and Cognitive Load: a Summary of Community Discussions
Operations engineering is moving in the direction of platform engineering according to Charity Majors, CTO at Honeycomb. Majors sees platform teams tending to work higher up the stack than operations, DevOps, and SRE teams do. This shift in focus enables organizations to focus their limited development resources on their core product to drive maximum business value.
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Building an Effective Platform by Focusing on End-to-End Workflows
Platform engineering teams need to focus on building end-to-end workflows versus individual tools according to Naphat Sanguansin, CTO at Prodvana. A focus on workflows will help to abstract away the complexities of running services and allow for application engineers to focus on their product.
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Learnings from Discussing Developer Enablement at QCon London
Developer enablement can increase the potential of individuals in small and larger companies. Where individuals can have their own solutions, there will be things that are mandatory for all. Metrics can help to see what is being used or not. Be careful about supporting developer enablement for legacy systems; if it’s outdated and needs to be replaced then it might be better to not invest in it.
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How Developer Enablement Brings Benefits to Software Organizations
Developer enablement is about tools and approaches that can greatly increase the potential we can have as individuals. It can have an impact on productivity and happiness, on profits and retention. Developer tools make it easier for engineers to deploy products, enabling them to focus on building a product.
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How to Build an In-App Messaging Platform: Lyft's Case
If you have ever thought about building an in-app messaging platform for your mobile app, Lyft's experience may help you get it right. Lyft engineers applied a three-staged approach: MVP, scaling, and optimization.
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Engineering Your Organization through Services, Platforms, and Communities
Organizations need to be able to sustainably deliver value to their customers and business; that is why they exist, said Randy Shoup at QCon Plus May 2021. To do so, they need to be able to effectively and efficiently leverage the “resources” they have at their disposal- their people, teams, and technology.
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How Spotify Leverages Paved Paths and Common Tooling to Improve Productivity
Maria Jernström and Jason Palmer, two product managers at Spotify, shared how the company enables their development teams to operate quickly and in alignment. The Platform Developer Experience tribe builds CI/CD tools, product creation tooling, and paved paths with a focus on automating common processes.
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Camille Fournier on Effectively Managing Internal Platform Teams
Camille Fournier, managing director, head of platform engineering for Two Sigma, recently shared her learnings from managing internal platform engineering teams. Two of the key challenges she shares are the smaller size of the customer base and the challenge in understanding how your customers will use your product.