Hi, what's your opinion on centralized vs. decentr...
# generalj
justcloudnative
02/05/2023, 2:47 PMHi, what's your opinion on centralized vs. decentralized in the context of platform engineering?
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Asaf Erlich
02/05/2023, 3:55 PMCan you give some specific examples about what you mean in that context?
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Andrew Fong
02/05/2023, 6:17 PMYou 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
02/05/2023, 6:20 PMMost 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
02/05/2023, 6:21 PMif 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)
j
justcloudnative
02/05/2023, 6:22 PMFor 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).
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Andrew Fong
02/05/2023, 6:23 PMIts all relative to the skills, stage and outcomes you’re looking for
Andrew Fong
02/05/2023, 6:24 PMSounds like the dev team is a dream 🙂 You want a team that wants this level of accountability and I’d do everything I can to enable them
j
justcloudnative
02/05/2023, 6:25 PMIn my opinion the dev team should not care about about the underlying enviroment.
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Andrew Fong
02/05/2023, 6:28 PMsure 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
02/05/2023, 6:29 PMi’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.
j
justcloudnative
02/05/2023, 6:32 PMYes, in my case the dev teams don't want the a) cognitive overload and b) they don't want spent human resources for that
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Andrew Fong
02/05/2023, 6:36 PMyeah i know what you mean :) we started a company around this problem
Andrew Fong
02/05/2023, 6:38 PMit 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
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