Technical PM here 🙋‍♂️

How do you envision the DevEx for managing infrastructure resources and other dependencies?

Everybody talks about infrastructure as code, so that's definitely what I would see for us. Currently we have AWS resources (CloudFormation) and Kubernetes manifests as YAML in the same repo as the application code. We do not use Helm or any advanced templating (just Mustache). Changes are applied via CI/CD when deploying a new version (CloudFormation update, kubectl "apply"). Some teams already use AWS CDK and I can foresee us adopting something higher-level (than YAML) going forward. There are some trade-offs between what is possible to customize locally vs. how to allow central changes across 200 teams. YAML is not so bad right now as we do automated PRs to change certain things as needed (e.g. Kubernetes API version updates needing changes). Full "code" can make this harder to achieve (interpreting turing-complete code from automated tools). We definitely strive to increase leverage, i.e. remove toil from engineers and move to centrally provided services incl. updates etc.

WDYT about Backstages Golden Paths idea?

Our developer portal ("Sunrise") is based on Backstage and I'm certainly a fan of golden paths. Currently we have so-called application templates (e.g. for Java Spring Boot app) in our developer portal so teams can get started easily. The idea is that our communities of practice (e.g. Kotlin or Python guild) provide such "golden path" application templates for the common use cases.

How do you deal with failure and debugging of infrastructure?

That's always a tricky topic. Right now our Container Platform team is looped in when necessary, e.g. if some EC2 Kubernetes worker node behaves in a strange way (that happens from time to time on AWS). Teams have the possibility to subscribe to cluster updates (we have >160 Kubernetes clusters) and can also stop any ongoing cluster updates if they suspect some issues. The Container Platform team has inspection tools to check cluster health, e.g. networking etc and relies on Prometheus/ZMON/Grafana for monitoring. In general we follow a continuous delivery approach for any changes going to production Kubernetes clusters. There is some KubeCon talk about this --> We do not have advanced infrastructure debugging capabilities for engineering teams right now, but they can always request (automated, 4-eyes approval) cluster API access e.g. to start some Pod with Busybox or do port forwarding.

For those that are interested in the developer environment side of platforms - https://devxconf.org/ is happening now

Is legacy Kubernetes workloads a thing? @Ravi Lachhman, Field CTO at Shipa, will talk about how Kubernetes directly impacts internal customers and platforms. He will discuss: • Designing for when folks eventually leave. • How to validate the “truth” over workloads that the authors might not even be around to explain. • Ketch, an Open Source project looking to address Kubernetes developer complexities. Shipa is one of PlatformCon's proud sponsors 📣. We are thankful for their contribution to the growth of this conference!

I'd like to ask a question for the audience: what specific platform teams are the designers of the Golden Path? I have seen some tribes around programming languages, but I wonder if this requires a collaborative effort between different platform teams.

And.. another topic: Are your platform teams using Team (REST) APIs? What functionality those APIs contain?

What cloud-native utilities/services are offered as "product" by your platform teams? Have they been built on top of https://clutch.sh/?

We often talk about needing a Kubernetes platform, but are we really looking for a PaaS? The talk Daniel Bryant is giving at PlatformCon will look back on his experience building platforms, both as an end-user and now as part of an organization helping their customers do the same. Developers, do you take responsibility for coding applications only or also shipping and running them from your end?

👋 Hi just joined but wonder if there were any discussions or if you know of talks that discuss where to build value in a Platform and where to use pre-built solutions whether open-source or vendors? I'm thinking of making a Wardley map or something similar for our own inhouse platform to visualize where we should be concentrating on building unique value.

Just curiosity. Are there any Platform team that is not using K8S to deploy microservices?

I know a lot of people that picked nomad

as well as a lot that use ecs fargate

we are pretty big on cloud foundry (DIT bet on it 6-7 years ago) but it's turning into a dead end so we're looking at things that retain the cloudfoundry/heroku style mental model for developers while running on k8s https://github.com/cloudfoundry/cf-for-k8s

I used ECS a couple years ago and I liked it way more than working with k8s now.

Every very senior person in early stage i know has said what @jonny s. Just said

Another curiosity about (Spotify) Golden Paths. Sorry for having so many questions 😅. I perceive that the happy path is 1 golden path (e.g to deploy a Java/Go/whatever microservice in K8s) per repository. But, in case that a microservice needs to apply a schema change, is this part of the same golden path, or do you consider that is a different service that needs to be coordinated in the same flow?

current place uses k8s, previous used ECS and I much preferred that - less complexity and basically achieved the same end goal

Just curious to know what are top 3 things everyone doing as part of platform team? This will help everyone understand kind of thing we are doing in our platform teams. For us: 1. Built an operator to deploy application seamlessly 2. Created a deployment service to create deployment using API (using operator CRD internally) 3. Working on simplifying access management. (How you guys doing this?)

Hi Mitesh re; 3 - we built a company around this, will be doing a talk in July if you're interested

I have a question for the people that use Backstage. How do you update and manage teams and their members?

We often talk about needing a Kubernetes kubernetes platform, but are we really looking for a PaaS? At PlatformCon Daniel Bryant, Head of DevRel at Ambassador Labs will look back on his experience building platforms, both as an end-user and now as part of an organization helping customers do the same. The key takeaways from his talk for you will be: • Learn to treat platform as a product. • Realize that you can’t have good developer experience (DevEx) without good UX. • Focus on workflows and tooling interoperability.

What are some of the tooling options out there that can help the Platform team document APIs, SDKs, How-to Guides, and any supporting documentation for application developers? Heard about Backstage, but like to learn about how others manage a dev portal.

2 questions❓: 1. Do you wonder if your engineers enjoy the internal tooling they use every day? 2. Do you struggle with keeping developer technical documentation appealing and relevant? If at least one answer is 👌, then the talk @Stefan Kolesnikowicz is giving at platformcon might just be what you are looking for. Stefan will discuss how a small team managed to improve Achievers’ engineering culture through automation and tooling.

Hi, All! I recently configured

GitOps

+

ArgoCD

to deploy to a Kubernetes cluster after commits and merges in Git. This works fine, but we want to take the user experience to the next level beyond committing to Git every time. Using the Internal Developer Portal, users want to be able to skaffolding and management of the application they want with a click. But the difficulty I feel here is the Git Layer. Since GitOps is distributed using the Git Repository, all changes must occur in the Git Repo. (Single Source of Truth) If you change the value (eg. replicas, helm value...) on the dashboard, you also need to commit it to Git. What is the best practice in this case? 1. When a change value is triggered in the dashboard, the operator or API server commits it to Git on its behalf. 2. You cannot modify the dashboard after scaffolding, only the Read Only mode is allowed. If you want to change the value, you have to edit it directly in Git. Anyone running GitOps and dashboards together? I'm curious about your experience. 🤔

Question: What metrics does your team to track your performance as a platform engineering team?

Question: What strategies / Tools do you use to test your Platform Solution? What steps do you take, what process do you follow and what tasks do you handle in order to make sure you are releasing super solid software!?

I dont think software development for platform is very different than anything else. Unit and integration tests, fuzzing etc

Fuzzing probably goes up if the platform is scaled tbh