Hi what are some of the challenges with platform engineering

Question

Hi what are some of the challenges with platform engineering in edge Can someone share their approach My feel is edge has alot of additional complexity that I imagine most developers don t want to deal with They just want code to run closest to end users

jean-philippe Foures · Answer

Hi From my point of view the main challenge is to abstract complexity by designing and building simple platforms running basic services following your organization best practices and propose these simple platforms as templates to your dev So 1 Define what are your guidelines for deploying and maintaining platforms running on edge infra 2 Creates some simple platforms following guidelines and propose them to some developers kind of beta testers 3 Adding CI CD and observability on your platform 4 Open the tool 5 Add more complex platforms when teams are ready and iterate I hope I well understood your question abd I also hope it helps a bit

Carl Moberg · Answer

Hi < Timothy Fong> I have a brief write up on the topic here but I will say that I observe two things that I belive will trickle through to developers through i e an IDP

Carl Moberg · Answer

1 The hardware in many on site edges is heterogenous and pretty limited So you want to make sure that e g an application that require GPU is only scheduled on nodes that actually have a GPU available 2 It is unlikely that you want to run all applicaitons in all locations with the same configuration and version so there is a need to describe to the orchestration layer under which circumstances to run the applications Circumstances can be e g geographical configured i e stores of size medium or directly related to resource availability

Hugo Pinheiro · Answer

To add to what Carl mentioned hardware can also have bad spotty connection to the internet be limited in resources it s a interesting space

Timothy Fong · Answer

Thanks < Carl Moberg> this is good How much declarative granularity is granted to the developer versus they are given more abstract categories E g should it be down to the GPU system set that they specify Or are these categories pre determined by workload ML rendering physics

Timothy Fong · Answer

When you mean version are you talking about version of the software or package And availability is that like a logical tree first x resource then y resource if not available

Timothy Fong · Answer

< jean philippe Foures> makes sense in principle Can you give a concrete example of an abstraction from a beat practice

Carl Moberg · Answer

< Timothy Fong> to early to tell on the question about declarative granularity imho We the industry need a little more experience I think we ll have three types of data to match against configured think labels hardware configuration host level memory is gpu available is camer attached etc and state e g how much memory is available right now The first two is easy to match against as they move slowly or are under complete administrative control The third one state is harder as scheduling based on matching with parameters that may change at any time leads to complexity

Carl Moberg · Answer

When I say version I do mean a versioned application which usually consists of a set of versioned container images And yes there s tree like ordering required

Timothy Fong · Answer

Thanks < Carl Moberg> do you think for now it wouldn t seem naive as a product manager to both a allow optional granularity while b figuring out with platform team and the value streams what they understand the workload requirements to be at the workload level I like scores approach of workload oriented even though the score spec includes things like cpu and memory and other things

Timothy Fong · Answer

< Carl Moberg> I read the docs seems powerful If the platform team had a product manager and used Avasso it seems like there is no need to capture requirements and abstractions since the labels and other matching of workloads can just be done self serve Have you found the customers are for platform team smaller such they didn t need a product manager to harmonize different implementations

Timothy Fong · Answer

I

Timothy Fong · Answer

have a core and edge model and my gut is

Timothy Fong · Answer

On the flip side I am talking to a company with its own edge nodes to join platform team This describes how I imagine they would want to approach building a platform to use the edge

Timothy Fong · Answer

Can you give me an example of how this works in the real world We have a write once run everywhere approach but very geo heterogeneous Some countries have poor connections

Timothy Fong · Answer

We have this limitation as well So how do you think an edge platform should best address this I am not sure if having different application versions at a higher level works for us But I have been thinking perhaps the kinds of services used could be For example rendering for low capacity and poor connectivity sites could use the service that has a lower resolution service

jean-philippe Foures · Answer

< Timothy Fong> about by abstraction as example you can create some bricks using your preferred resources a web server composed of instance + local storage+ image+ security groups Combined with a db and so on You can also pre build entire platforms and propose them directly to your devs

Carl Moberg · Answer

For the question in <https platformengin b0m7058 slack com archives C04RLL5BQ4W p1682815226222929 thread ts=1682661129 236639 amp cid=C04RLL5BQ4W> I notice that among our users the platform teams are in charge of the definition of labels and they then allow application teams to match against them A sign of maturity is of course whether the label taxonomy is created collaboratively between platform and app value stream teams

Carl Moberg · Answer

And for the question in <https platformengin b0m7058 slack com archives C04RLL5BQ4W p1682818643187659 thread ts=1682661129 236639 amp cid=C04RLL5BQ4W> IMHO there are two ways of thinking about it Either 1 as a scheduling placement challenge i e how do we formally define where a specific application consisting of several containers should be started and kept alive In the Avassa system we use site and host level label matching for that Or 2 as a configuration management challenge i e where the same application needs different configuration based on which site it is running on In this case the configuration distribution mechanism needs to be able to access the same label space as the placement scheduling and use that