Hi folks! I'm new here. I'm wondering if there's anyone who has gone through the journey of bootstrapping a new startup from a handful of developers to scaling to ~25 developers and when and to what extent platform engineering principles were adopted. I saw this line on the blog: > And while if your team is composed of 5 developers, a platform team and IDP are surely an overkill, as soon as your organization grows past the 20-30 developers mark, an Internal Developer Platform is probably something you should look at, sooner rather than later. I wasn't sure if implementing the practice from the immediate start with a handful of developers made sense, but at the very least I want to setup for a successful transition.

I wrote a decision flow for Platform Engineering adoption here. It helps get a few foundations in place and helps you decide when to fully invest. One of the things you will be able to do in your specific case is think about what skills you hire for - the areas you could strengthen as you grow the team. Who understands CI/CD, security, infrastructure automation, and other common focus areas of platforms. If you scale further later on, these hires are likely to be the folks you'd build a platform team with.

Hi, we grew from 20 to 80 "over night", and if not good and well defined platform and devops principles we would not survive. Happy to share some battle scars 🙂

This is one of the hard bits we tried to tackle by producing the CNCF Platform Maturity Model. IMO your question itself sets out the most balanced option. You asked about implementing the "practice". When you're small, you're likely to benefit from the more ad hoc and loose structure of the provisional stage of the model. But by knowing what good looks like further along, you can prioritise investing in the practices and methodologies that will grow into more operable and scalable solutions as you need them. This pattern sounds a lot like @Kuba Holak 's experience. I'd love to hear more about how you walked the line of investment to have your success Kuba!

Following to listen to the stories!

@Kuba Holak - keen to hear that story!