Hi Platformers, let’s 🔥 up this channel shall we? I want to introduce you to Bryan Finster, he’s the mastermind behind the delivery platform at Walmart. Can’t wait for this talk until June 9th? Then you can also join the webinar and hear out how his company helps scaling continuous delivery to Walmart.

Cross-posting to remind you of the Q&A this Wednesday, April 13th! https://platformengin-b0m7058.slack.com/archives/C02FDQAHZTK/p1649708201633149?thread_ts=1649172677.606169&cid=C02FDQAHZTK

Hi @Renato Mefi What was the biggest pain point you and the team faced to establish a platform team?

Where do I fit a Restful API in this kind of architecture?

Hopefully once the services are well defined, we’ll have the Source of Truth for each of them, this allows data to be mutated by that service, and only that given service. This means this service can do the data change, propagate an event and move forward. Ideally without dual-writes The read APIs can be done on the same service on even another one, it’ll depends on the system throughput and separation of those two concerns. If you’d like more details on this please ask

What was the biggest pain point you and the team faced to establish a platform team?

There are some spheres to this problem: • The team itself ◦ The people in the platform team usually have to be interested in multiple subjects, that’s so they can help with the broad context platform has to deal with. Once you implement a microservices architecture, someone who only focus on BE won’t see the network/queues issues for instance, and could easily saturate those with some decisions. This goes in multiple areas of the platform, development experience, architecture, backend, backend for frontend, etc • The other teams ◦ Once you’re a central team and start to help solve a bigger problem, it’ll impact multiple teams, to start with: ▪︎ Platform and team A have to be in agreement ▪︎ Maybe team A and team B aren’t on the same page ◦ how will a platform team get everyone on the same page? Sometimes it’s not possible, so coming up with solutions that embrace all can be very tricky, my tip would be to always leave room for customization, however this is also tricky.. I mean, many challenges here, I’m happy to expand in any of them if you have more questions 🙂

What are the dual writes? I still don’t get the main point of it.

That’s a great one Dual-writes tend to be an “invisible” problem, until you see it, then you see it everywhere! Dual-writes means writing something twice, so let’s say you do an operation on the database, and then you have to send a message to a broker, or make an API call, etc. This process can look simple, however, if the second operation has to be data consistent with the first one, then how do you guarantee that? It’s oftentimes a second thought, but if you store to the DB and then the API call fails, do you rollback the transaction? And what if the application crashes in between the DB transaction and the API call? If you put them in the same transaction would you be creating an “idle in transaction” issue in your infrastructure? dual-writes can also be see as an “unknown cause for data inconsistency” It’s common we want thing to be consistent, and dual-writes is an invisible problem that might be causing data inconsistency in your platform, that’s a very common and dangerous one.

Thank you, @Renato Mefi for your time! Till the 21st of April at the webinar 🙂

How many women DevOps engineers do we have in this community? 👋 Hila Fish started small, but grew powerful 💪. She’s a Senior DevOps Engineer at WIX, maintaining all infrastructure aspects for the Data Engineering group that handles 10TB of data per day. At PlatformCon she will share how she and her team migrated the entire R&D’s codebase from BitBucket to GitLab.

Wondering when is the right time to start building your own platform and when can you afford it? @Alison Rosewarne went through these dilemmas and is going to share her story, highlighting: • The right time to start and how to get buy-in • Ways to measure platform benefit and ROI • How to reach market fit sooner Do you have a success or setback story of making a decision of building a platform yourself? Share it here!

More great stories to come at PlatformCon! 😛latformcon: @Simone Sciarrati, Principal Engineer and Team Lead at Meltwater will present the company's 6 years of the journey from Dev VS Ops to autonomous teams and the rise of their internal platform. You will hear about: • The mind-shift needed to move from internal services to an internal platform and what it means to treat the platform as a real product with fellow engineers as customers. • The challenges of driving adoption when there is no company mandate to use the platform. • How ideas inspired by ShapeUP influenced our working process on the way to becoming a high-performing team.

A PM in my team recently wrote about supporting our analysts in writing and deploying Python applications. Perhaps not your typical platform, but one that gave us a lot of value! Curious to your thoughts. https://blog.picnic.nl/turning-shadow-it-into-sunshine-it-262e5e17e323

Related to ☝️ we're hosting a meetup in Amsterdam. You can join remotely as well! https://www.linkedin.com/events/hybridevent-picnicedgeplatform-6932596152819187713/about/

This talk will resonate with everyone facing the problem of adoption. @Olga Sermon (Senior Engineering Manager at SuperAwesome) will showcase the tools they have adapted and developed in the process of rolling out their platform. She will show their RFCs for all roadmap items, user communication channels and templates, training and feedback collection forms and meetings. Not much left to wait! Olga will give this talk on the 9th of June 😛latformcon:

What does it take to build a robust platform for your multiple engineering teams to use, and build it well? One which can accommodate multiple teams, of varying skills 🤹, doing similar as well as very different things? Nicki Watt (CEO/CTO at OpenCredo) will walk us through these questions in her talk, looking at key technical aspects to consider, but just as important, organizational, soft skills and other factors which form part of the platform engineering discipline. Did you already come up with some questions for Nicki? You'll be able to ask her anything on June 9! 🙂

THE day has come 😛latformcon:, 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! 🙂

Today’s keynote speaker is 🥁🥁🥁... @Gregor, author of Cloud Strategy. He will discuss why building successful platforms isn't as simple as it looks at a first glimpse. His talk looks at the main decisions and trade-offs you need to make when building an internal platform. Don’t forget you’ll be able to ask Gregor anything throughout the Q&A session today in this track channel!

How do I knopw what track I am looking at?

👋 @Simone Sciarrati How did you get real developer adoption? Can you share more on that?

Hello everyone. Happy to answer any questions on my thoughts on Platform as a Product. Difficult to get everything into a short talk. 🙂

Hi everyone, I'll be happy to answer any comments or questions related to my talk: https://platformcon.com/talk/you-dont-have-to-be-a-giant-to-carry-teams-on-your-shoulders

Nice to meet you@Bryan Finster. Is the platform you built at Walmart still in usage today? How did you balance getting both developer adoption and executive buy-in?

Nice to meet you everyone, Corinna Ludwig, customer Engineer at Google. Also available for questions if our Talk comes Up

Hi All, happy to chat and answer any questions you may have re my talk People, Process & Platform - a community focused approach 🙂

Hello @Gregor. Really liked your talk! When will your book on Platform Strategies be published? Is there already a date you can share? Can’t wait for it.

Hi @Silvia Rhodes - it was meant to be last fall 😅 It's not an easy topic to get into a linear flow as I am looking to cover many aspects from platform characteristics down to design decisions (and come up with more clever models like fruit salads and sinking platforms). I am aiming to have early access on Leanpub by late Summer this year Thanks for everyone's patience

I'd also be happy to hear input if folks would prefer to read the book earlier, even if editing and flow might not be entirely great In any case, you can register your interest in the book at leanpub.com/platformstrategy

Hey everyone! Note to say I’m here and happy to answer any questions about my talk, whatever they may be. Hope you enjoy the conference!

I'd be curious if anyone has a good example of a platform that's more like a fruit basket and one that's clearly fruit salad

Are there any good references to how to size the platform group within a company? Maturity, company profile, business domain?