SECURITY 🔐 Last week I had fun hosting the meetup with @Chris Tomkins, Lead Developer Advocate at Tigera. Chris explained how to properly secure containers, VMs and host-based workloads. Their OSS project Calico is a great implementation of it. If you or your team are interested in digging deeper into the nuances of network security and K8s CNIs, I definitely encourage you to check this freshly baked recording! Also @Chris Tomkins agreed to answer any questions today, feel free to drop them here below in a thread 🙂

Hey folks 👋 I don't know this is the correct channel, but I'm not able to sign up for a trial. Can someone help me?

Hey all! Our team have been remote for over 2️⃣ years now. We often discuss whether we should go back to an office, at least partially. Wondering what folks’ setup here is. How does your team currently work? 🏠 Remote 🏢 On-site ⚖️ Hybrid

ive noticed Slack channels like these to be extremely biased towards people who prefer telecommuting

Are there any realistic alternatives to backstage.io?

I've been digging into clutch.sh, and generally like it as a framework. It's got far less built in than backstage, which might or might not be what you want :)

@Kaspar just wrote a long article on the fallacies of platform engineering. The problem with focussing on service catalogues: it feels like you're solving something obvious (such as starting a new microservice) but this isn't really driving ROI. That said they are important from a certain size onwards, that size is (MINIMUM 200), rather higher.

The way I found to make it non-disfunctional was basically "let's focus on cataloguing things for which we have a practical task at hand". E.g. it makes sense to catalogue services because our platform has tools to manage the dev cycle, ci, cd etc. of those services. The issue is.. if you're building such tool, then the catalogue is part of that tool already. You're not building a catalogue but a platform that contains a catalogue. This logic can only be avoided if you think of the catalogue as "generic". BUT, this is the gateway to building an inventory of things in the company disconnected from a practical purpose. Because you literally end up with an inventory of everything (people, users, teams, services, rooms, chairs.. ) that is integrated with nothing (the platform, hr systems, office management systems, etc. that actually do something with those items). Said integration turns out to be really hard because well.. those tools have their own inventory. And you end up with your grand project for an Über inventory, but no usage.

the most powerful way i have seen a useful catalog developed was that it becomes an emergent property of your system. For example I have seen a declarative build system emit a service dependency graph due to how the build was setup and the way the development environment worked. also i think the problem tends to be that the service catalog is technical in nature so it's really useless for non-techncial folks that want an abstraction oriented around the business problem hierarchy - so you’ve made the job of the developer easier but it hasn't actually solved a customer problem

proposal: use threads when possible to keep conversations grouped together...it avoids the confusion of crossing the streams 😄 thankfully this is still relatively small, but as the community grows it can serve as a useful "index" of discussions when searching.

In company with 350+ employees. 100 of them in product&tech. Been looking a long time for developer platforms, hearing about thoughtworks putting dev platforms on "adopt". Still cannot get my around developing our own "platform", it just seems so much work. We do have some sort of structure. A "landing zone" script invoked pr team which creates two azure subscriptions with some basic resources, access groups, service principals, service connections, azdevops project ++. Also considering adding observability components and policies into this script. I guess that's our "platform". Script can be re-invoked if extended with more components. Teams use terraform for provisioning infrastructure. We have our own modules that should simplify their job

Hi everyone! Ok, talking about supply-chain security we’re usually talking about external forces injection malicious code. In this case we have a maintainer who decided his protest would hit the right people if he deletes data on Russian and Belarusian servers. Is there any tool or process, other than a direct code review of any version upgrade (not really feasible) that would have prevented data loss here, i.e. stopped the update before it can cause harm? https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/big-sabotage-famous-npm-package-deletes-files-to-protest-ukraine-war/

Hi Platformers! Just wondering how many of you here use k8s :kubernetes: vs VMs :virtual-machine:?

For the ones still using VM’s or docker-compose, I can highly recommend https://microk8s.io/. It’s k8 with a LOT less of the complexity / maintenance involved, which is the main reason why I heard people don’t like using K8

Forgive me if this question has been asked answered already. I am eager to hear how your companies are structuring the SRE and Platform Engineering functions. Are they in one org? Do these functions ultimately report to the same leader? How are the responsibilities divided among SREs and Platform engineers? Are you SREs embedded with the dev teams? From my research I am seeing a ton of different models and am eager to hear what is working for teams of 150ish developers.

Yeesh https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/y5hdmv0p49x3

As some of you know, we have been cooking something special for you this past month 🍳🍳 Excited to finally announce the first ever conference dedicated to Platform Engineering, PlatformCon! 🥳 It will be 2 days of expert talks, inspiring stories and debates on everything ranging from platform tech (Kubernetes, Terraform and more) to DevEx flows and platform design topics. It will be the celebration of this community and of our meetup events for the past 2 years. So save the date - June 9-10th and go register now (for free)! The event will be 100% virtual with pre-recorded talks. All speakers will join this Slack and host AMAs and Q&As the day their talk goes live. We created 4 dedicated channels #platform-design #platform-stories #platform-tech #platform-culture and 1 channel #platformcon-news for general news that you can already join. We’ll warm them up soon 🔥 Let us know what you think of the event and I hope to see you there!

Hey everyone! Happy to join, Zohar, CEO of Port (DevPortal as a service) 👋 Happy to be part of this community!!

Hello everyone! I work as an Engineering Manager for Platform Team at Getir. Currently leading Reliability and Infrastructure focus groups (We also have Engineering Experience and Delivery focus groups as well). Happy to share our journey and excited to listen and learn from you!

Hello people! One more Getir-ian :getir: here! Director of Platform Engineering, looking forward to listen learn, share and passionately argue about best ways to enable developers deliver better and faster 😄 Feel free to drop me a connection request: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilyasakharov/

Hey platformers! We thought it'd be nice to do a monthly round up, as the community keeps growing so much. Here's the recap for March, please let me know what you think and what else you'd like to see 🙂

And here is the the 🔥 debate!

anybody use https://earthly.dev? just discovered it with the release of https://dagger.io yesterday. both tools look to solve an interesting space

Interesting to me, is that the majority of the successful platforms, have a clear product mindset. But as far as I can see, It seems to me that PM role is not represented in any of the conversation above or in this group. So rise your hand 🤚 if you are a Product Manager for a internal platform! ;)

i spent a couple years working for pivotal, who taught "platform as product" including embedding a product manager in the product team, creating a "brand", etc. and a couple years before that on a platform team that embraced lean product thinking (each group was treated as a startup, and challenged with doing their own "user research" to determine the needs of other teams and what "products" to offer). i'm not a PM, but that all instilled tremendous respect for "product thinking" and i think that without this success is very difficult...not just in platform, but technology in general. there are always shiny things to distract ourselves with, figuring out what is truly valuable and useful to "customers" (who quite often do not know what they need until they see it) takes continuous effort.

what are ways for getting investments into internal platforms? How you convince/d stakeholders (or senior leadership) of your company to invest more resources (budgets/people)

Anyone have any strong feelings about hiring PMs for your platform team?

Been reading up on this - https://infraeng.dev/hiring-ratio/ (strongly recommend the whole thing to be honest) and was wondering whether anyone in this thread use hiring ratios in practice for headcount planning?