Platform engineering is the discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations in the cloud-native era.

Platform Engineering

GKE tends to be the better implementation

It was my question for the audience :slightly_smiling_face:

But in GKE do you still have to:
• maintain most of the supporting tools yourself (monitoring, autoscaling...),
• write huge yaml descriptors?

<@U03GMT74WLC> you have to listen to my talk tomorrow on Kubernetes as a cloud operating system!

Regarding your question, I think it’s as complicated as what you need

So if you just need to take a docker container and run it, you can probably get away with simpler options like heroku/appengine/etc

Thanks ! I look forward to your talk <@U037UG2MZL3>

But if you need autoscaling, health checks, configuration management, secrets… etc

The complexity is in your requirements (which are requirements we all have) not kubernetes

<@U037UG2MZL3> I'll watch your talk too!

The thesis behind my talk (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xKONsYbaco>) is that ECS Fargate is enough for most of the use cases.

<@U02MTRVCH19> cool, I’m going to listen! I’d like to hear that

I fully agree with <@U037UG2MZL3>. Complexity grows with your needs, no matter what platform you choose to run your containers on. I’ve found that ECS is awesome for just getting started running your containers but when you want more advanced capabilities like service mesh, service discovery, blue/green, gitops, etc. you will find that even ECS can get very complicated (with a lot of hacks).

As a great example, we’re currently using ECS and wanted a service mesh with JWT auth in our sidecar proxy containers. This is not supported by AppMesh (which is the only official service mesh for ECS) and we ended up having to reverse engineer AppMesh to figure out how AWS generates the envoy bootstrap and write our own which was compatible with app mesh :eyes: :smile:

But I also agree with what you are saying <@U02MTRVCH19>. Most people getting started with container orchestration might not need these capabilities, and in that case I think it’s completely fine to just start out with ECS

<@U03JXEXB942> Like always: we have to choose the right tool. There are some companies that need really advanced features and some that don't. I wanted to point out that using Kubernetes often is like taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

Your service mesh example is very good - if you need one and have enough people to support it, Kubernetes is currently the best choice.

Well said :thumbsup: And thanks for the talk btw! <@U02MTRVCH19>