Hi what s your opinion on centralized vs decentralized in th

Question

Hi what s your opinion on centralized vs decentralized in the context of platform engineering

Asaf Erlich · Answer

Can you give some specific examples about what you mean in that context

Andrew Fong · Answer

You can make either work Centralized teams are easier and require less great leadership bc its single objective outcome If you decentralize the team and try and build the platform you require strong leaders in both technical and managerial capacities

Andrew Fong · Answer

Most likely you ll require an executive level sponsor in a decentralized structure It also becomes very hard if there are tradeoffs that need to occur The problem with centralized is that teams tend to optimized locally for pain and miss out on the bigger picture ie fix our toil vs customer toil IMO it all comes down to the people and leaders you have

Andrew Fong · Answer

if you re talking about orgs that are smaller then decentralized with fix it type weeks days and an involved senior leader say team size of 50 100

justcloudnative · Answer

For example when a dev team wants to run their container in k8s should they get their own cluster and then the cluster is manged by the dev team or a namespace and the cluster is manged by the platform team

Andrew Fong · Answer

Its all relative to the skills stage and outcomes you re looking for

Andrew Fong · Answer

Sounds like the dev team is a dream slightly smiling face You want a team that wants this level of accountability and I d do everything I can to enable them

justcloudnative · Answer

In my opinion the dev team should not care about about the underlying enviroment

Andrew Fong · Answer

sure but if they do and you dont provide them a way to not then sounds great that they are willing to take on the accountability

Andrew Fong · Answer

i d recommend not being dogmatic and focus on the outcome that generates revenue Platform is about efficiency and if you dont need it the team doesn t perceive they need it management isn t making a case for it and the team is willing why worry about it

justcloudnative · Answer

Yes in my case the dev teams don t want the a cognitive overload and b they don t want spent human resources for that

Andrew Fong · Answer

yeah i know what you mean we started a company around this problem

Andrew Fong · Answer

it really depends what the pain is we focused on deployment only and avoided PaaS style things bc at scale people want more control knobs later