these are two good articles for testing platforms https://blog.convex.dev/randomized-testing/ https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/-testing-our-new-sync-engine

+1 what @Andrew Fong said ☝️ plus contractual tests i.e define api contracts between platform and its consumers early in cycle and devise or chose a right framework to validate these contracts is very imp.

Maybe a question for the culture channel but there’s a lot of questions that pop up around “how do you do this for platforms” — almost universally there’s no different between development in platforms or anywhere else. Software engineering fundamentally is the same across the stack. The variance is in the toolchain maturity not the principles.

THE day has come platformcon, we are making history today 📜. Welcome to the first ever PlatformCon! I hope to see you all during the kick-offs. Don’t forget to say hi in the comments. 🙂 Please find all the useful links for day 1️⃣ here in one place, so you don’t get lost 🙂 • • Talks to watch on demand or by tracks: ◦ Platform Stories ◦ Platform Tech ◦ Platform Design ◦ Platform Culture • Recommended paths: Fundamentals, Advanced, Management. • Have any questions? Reach out to support@platformcon.com or DM me or @Luca Galante Enjoy the (recordings) ride and make the most of this conference! 🙂

If you are designing a fairly large platform to support upwards of 100 dev teams, what is the best approach to think about cloud accounts, would you have one platform account for everything or would you have an account per dev team or product? Any learning from those who have walked this path?

I'd personally recommend staying away from aligning account structures on teams: 1. If you re-org, your team/account alignment can suddenly be blown out of the water. 2. It has a form of Conway's law affect when your cloud architecture starts to mirror your teams.

It is rare for devs to need to log into a cloud account. this is down the route of having a platform they can log into to perform the deploy, status functions. I support 100s of dev teams, and most interaction with the cloud is minimal, instead Jenkins tools and ELK abstract

Hello all, Hope you’re having a good conference thus far! Just a quick note that my talk People, Process and Platform - A Community Focused Approach whilst tagged primarily as #platform-stories actually fits this #platform-design track as well 🙂

of course happy to answer any questions if there are!

👋 Hello, team!

Good afternoon in the EU and an early morning here in Chicago! Happy to answer any questions on my talk on the role of the Technical Product Manager! https://platformcon.com/speaker/schuyler-bishop

Hi @Nicki Watt, in your talk you mentioned you should promote freedom over autonomy and create alignment on boundaries. How to get such alignment on boundaries? I sometimes have the feeling most of the dev teams insist on their own choice of tools.

Good Morning to Evening everyone! Happy to be hear and chat about anything regarding data and the value of communicating in simple terms to leadership. https://platformcon.com/talk/how-to-deliver-predictably-with-platform-analytics

Based in Sydney and it is a cold winter night … relatively speaking.

Morning all, I'm happy to take any questions on my talk about building "golden path" platforms 🙌

Hi... more than happy to answer any question about the lighting talk How we improve the developer experience at ClarityAI... The slides and references in the following post https://www.eferro.net/2022/06/platformcon-2022-lightning-talk-how-we.html

Hello everyone. I hope my talk was useful, happy to answer questions about the what and why of Platform as a Product. https://platformcon.com/talk/platform-as-a-product

Hey everyone, I hope my talk about how to design an infrastructure for both balance and scale was helpful. Happy to answer any questions or simply talk design 🙂

@eferro just looked at your slides, how did you go about changing culture/metrics and communicate across silos?

@Manuel Pais (co-author Team Topologies) Can you share any further strategies or materials on how to market an internal platform to different stakeholders? I guess for devs you would need something different than for management?

Hello @Ralf Huuck, great talk! What other metrics besides DORA would you recommend focusing on? And how to measure. I found also these different kinds of velocities interesting. Would love to learn more about that.

Me too me too! Happy #platformcon day! I am also around to answer any questions people maybe have to my talk regarding the developer experience and how Achievers solved problems for our engineers (specifically around 10+ years of old documentation). I will be around most of the day to respond to questions platformcon platformcon platformcon

A question for @Schuyler Bishop. What was the biggest challenge you experienced in the role of a platform PM? Was it more tech related or cultural? Thank you in advance 🙂

@Stefan Kolesnikowicz we are very much struggling building the right documentation around our platform. Finding people good at docs is extremely hard! I was also watching your conversation with @Luca Galante, @Jessica Ulyate and @Schuyler Bishop, really interesting. You guys briefly touched on templating but I was wondering whether you had more examples of useful boilerplates you all used to facilitate dev adoption?

Hi @Manuel Pais (co-author Team Topologies) I really loved your talk. Every time that I'm reading about platform teams we end up with tons of examples more related to SRE and DevOps. But do you think that in larger organizations will be useful having another kind of platform teams that are between SRE and Stream-aligned teams? Nowadays we are facing a lot of complexity and cognitive load related to some part of our business domain. A lot of different stream-aligned teams and their value-streams rely on these business domains. We are thinking of creating platforms teams that are hiding and making it easier to share the knowledge of these business domain complexities through services and APIs for the stream-aligned teams. Do you think is a dangerous strategy or did you already see something similar in other places? We have some concerns in creating bottlenecks on these teams. Thanks!

Howdy buds, excited to be presenting at PlatformCon, happy to chat. How are you designing for Legacy Kubernetes Workloads [that is an oxymoron ha!]:

Hi @Manuel Pais (co-author Team Topologies), I love the idea of the Platform as a Product and I'm trying to adopt this into my company. The interesting part of your talk was connected that Platform should be some kind of a bridge to new technologies and innovators that keep eye on the new ideas and pass them to the stream-aligned Teams. Are you familiar with cases of treating Platform as a sometimes interrupter and not helper in introducing stuff? That Teams are okay with what they do (even if it's not effective) and there is some kind of pushback of changing the things that are working as always. Do you have any histories/examples how to break this wall? We are trying to find metrics, evangelize why something is important but it's quite difficult. Another questions: did you meet a Platform for Frontend? I mean we have a monolith architecture in our frontend approach to our pages and frontend developers spread around the Teams. According to Conway law, the monolith frontend that was designed to be shared across different teams, turns into monolith that everyone builds their own things into it and there is no sharing components between Teams. I'm thinking that Platform for Frontend would be a good option, any similar experiences?

Hi folks, I'm honored to have been included in the line up for this awesome conference. I hope you enjoyed my talk. I'd be happy to answer any questions, or provide further details or examples if folks would be interested. https://platformcon.com/talk/build-stuff-people-will-actually-use

@Colin Humphreys, @Manuel Pais (co-author Team Topologies), @Jessica Ulyate: From your experience, what does the optimal platform team look like? In terms of size and roles. And how to balance workload? Thanks for sharing your experience 🙂, Colin, such honesty in talking about fails is truly exceptional.

Thanks to everyone for the messages about my talk 🙌 I'll be online for another hour and happy to take questions! Here is a link to my summary article that I mentioned at the end of my presentation: https://blog.getambassador.io/is-platform-engineering-the-new-devops-or-sre-472ed97a1885