https://platformengineering.org logo
#platform-stories
Title
# platform-stories
g

Gregor

06/09/2022, 11:02 AM
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
b

Bryan Finster

06/09/2022, 11:04 AM
I'm getting lost in the analogy. šŸ˜„ Is the difference that fruit salad is a fruit basket in smaller pieces?
t

Torsten Linz

06/09/2022, 11:08 AM
I think the analogy only works when comparing two offerings. I don’t think you can say this offering is a fruit basket or fruit salad. As you can always go higher or lower. To stay with the image. The actual fruit salad could be considered a ā€œfruit basketā€ when compared with an organized picknick which would then be a ā€œfruit saladā€. Does this make sense?
b

Bryan Finster

06/09/2022, 11:13 AM
It could be I'm not caffeinated enough yet. :)
j

Jon Skarpeteig

06/09/2022, 11:21 AM
A related analogy I've seen used a lot is that the value is in the seams
g

Gregor

06/09/2022, 11:22 AM
Thanks for the thoughts šŸ™‚ A fruit salad isn't just a collection of pieces, they are specifically chosen and prepared for a concrete use case
j

Jon Skarpeteig

06/09/2022, 11:23 AM
An example I can think of is "Kubernetes" as a service, as opposed to "Elastic Kubernetes Service"
g

Gregor

06/09/2022, 11:23 AM
It was harder to get that into a 30 second segment in a 15 minute keynote...
j

Jon Skarpeteig

06/09/2022, 11:23 AM
By which I mean that EKS has integrations to a wider ecosystem (storage, networking et al)
Which makes it a lot more useful than having to couple that on your own
g

Gregor

06/09/2022, 11:24 AM
re. picnic: agreed, there's often layered platforms above or below. The analogy might get a bit tricky at that point šŸ™‚
b

Bryan Finster

06/09/2022, 11:24 AM
I sympathize with the time limit. I was struggling with 30 min and then saw it was 15 and had to ruthlessly cut.
😬 1
g

Gregor

06/09/2022, 11:25 AM
The fruit salad metaphor tries to speak to the platform "gestalt" if that's not too much a cop-out word. Here's the original blog post on it (I expanded it into a chapter in the Platform Strategy book) https://architectelevator.com/architecture/platforms-fruit-salad/
b

Bryan Finster

06/09/2022, 11:26 AM
If by ā€œfruit saladā€ you mean an integrated platform of carefully chosen tools for specific capabilities instead of a collection of options, yes I agree that's best. I touch on that in my talk too.
šŸ‘ 1
g

Gregor

06/09/2022, 11:52 AM
Caffeine kicked in šŸ˜‰
šŸ˜† 1
23 Views