Hello everyone, my name is Marco Marulli and I'm Principal Delivery Lead at McKinsey & Company. In my session, I discuss Streamlining developer platform design with reference architectures: Google Cloud use case. Please feel free to let me know of any questions you may have. I hope you enjoy PlatformCon and a big Thank You to the PlatformCon team for putting this together.

Heya Marco, i really liked your talk today. I ask where you got these reference architectures? this is really nice. My question is, is with these reference architectures it seems like it is only possible to have a platform with so many tools, so how many devs are you thinking a company must need before it is worth it to build a platform? since it seems crazy to think a startup with only 20 devs would be cost effective to build a platform like this. Is there reference architecture for smaller organisation? It is a shame i don't work at an enterprise anymore because this spec and orchestraotr would have been helpful🤣

Hey Fezzy, thanks for attending my talk! that's a great comment. These reference architectures are mostly for medium/large organizations. This does not mean though that a smaller org cannot use a lighter version of it. The minimal components, apart from the usual suspects (e.g. Git, Terraform, and a cloud platform) are the score spec and a platform orchestrator

Thanks for the answer. Very interesting. I will look at Score deeper. Is the orchestrator you showed in your reference arch the best option for smaller orgs as well?

I guess the answer is, it depends. If you're just starting up and you really do not have a separation between app and devops teams (you just have one team that does everything), maybe there's no need for an orchestrator yet. The moment you start to scale up and you a have dedicated devops team, I think that's the right time to start to look at an orchestrator so that you don't create this dependency between teams and run into all those issues that I talk about

Adding on top of this I would like to add does an orchestrator enables the steps that are taken to ensure that developers have the flexibility to choose the best tools and technologies for their specific needs? (great talk Marco!)