Hey Everyone! So I'm new to Platform engineering as a whole. Like brand new. Right now I'm taking the Certified Practitioner Course and supplementing technical requirements through Kode Klouds course. My back ground is mostly in IT with on Prem Server Administration, information Security, and business support. With all that, the question is how hard is it to break into Platform Engineering from System Administration? Anyone else went through a similar transition?

Have you played with Terraform or Kubernetes yet? Perhaps packer? Platform Engineering is enabling those around you to get their job done without you by creating applications and workflows which abstract the stuff you are capable of in a super simple and verifiable way. For example, if a person needs an environment for testing, can they simply chat in Slack what kind the want with the versions they want and that kicks off an orchestration which spawns that into existence? It’s really fun and cool stuff :)

Not yet! Like I understand what Terraform and Kubernetes are but never got to do testing with them yet! I actually plan on messing with them really soon to start getting hands on experience with them

The best way to play with them would be locally at home. Also ansible is a lot of fun!

Koby -- a small gift for you, we are running an open beta for a plat eng developer tool -- which includes a sandbox, could help you get started in a "real" environment : https://starops.dev , includes an LLM that you can ask questions and ofc generate terraform

Hi Koby, I can only relay my experience transitioning from System Administration to Platform Engineering so please take what I say with due skepticism; Firstly, it's very doable, provided you are aware from the get go that it's more of an evolution than a transition. When I was a sysadmin, it was 2006, "DevOps" hadn't been invented yet and web2.0 was the new hotness. By the time I was a Platform Engineer™️ ( 😉 ) we were post container-revolution, "digital transformation" was no longer a buzzword and Heroku had already been around for a long long while. For me it was a long journey from one perspective to the other. The biggest shift in my thinking has been interfaces. From my personal perspective, a platform is really only as good as it's interface, since that is what your Developers will be interacting with. In my experience as a sysadmin, I was mostly reacting to things, or at least trying to proactively limit how much reacting I had to do. I wasn't really building the tools I needed, and I wasn't building tools designed to be used by people not doing the same thing I was doing. For me designing and building "platforms" has largely been about thinking very hard about the way we expose the curated collection of tools, software and features to our developers so that they experience something cohesive and which supports their goals. Obviously theres a lot of nuance to that but for me it boils down mostly to that. Yes, the tools of the trade change over time and there's always some new fancy thing people wanna use, be it a language or a framework or a whatever. But if you can keep thinking about how the tools you design and build are going to be used, and be useful, then i think you're well on the way. Best of luck. hth