Hey Everyone ! My talk on Composable platforms is available for viewing here . It’s my first talk after a long break. It’s been fun trying to get back into it. Feel free to share your thoughts. I accept abuse and opinion equally ! Due to the shorter talk i couldn’t get into too much detail. If you’d like to know more I’m always available here on The Platform Engineering Slack !

Great talk @Chris Vermeulen 😄 - really interesting model, sort of an evolution of what a 'platform' actually looks like

Thanks Ian ! Yeah. One of the big gripes I’ve had with bigger platforms in the past, is the platform team is responsible for too much. Figuring out new tools, standardising and securing them, running them, providing them through interfaces, maintaining their uptime, etc. When developer teams need new stuff, the platform teams responsibilities keep growing as they include all of this in the platform. This model allows platform teams to scale and manage their capabilities a bit easier with nice standard interfaces, and allows teams to group themselves into pragmatic platforms, using those expertise, and “owning” their platform from SRE and deployment stand point. There is a lot I still need to experiment with though, and the idea is still pretty fresh.

makes sense, I guess there is a certain scale where this model tends to pay off

@Chris Vermeulen great talk 👍 Would you be able to share how many developers is your composable platform servicing? We currently have a "big platform" servicing 100s of developers. I wonder if moving to a composable platform would be more of a help or hindrance at that scale.

I haven’t used the concept on too wide a range of groups in order to give you a real answer just yet. Right now I am experimenting with it and finding the nuance. But I will add this. You can run a single platform in a composable way. That allows flexibility in the future or being able to spin up smaller environments when needed, but still allow you to run a single platform as you do now. For example if you have everything in one platform, and you need PCI compliance, everything needs to be compliant. If you have a composable platform, you can easily spin up a second platform specifically for PCI, and then continue down the normal path for the big platform, but have sharable pieces, almost like npm packages or pip packages, but distributed through Terraform.