Lessons learned from 7 years of running developer platforms
Submitted to DevOpsDays Austin 2023 on . Rejected.
- Level
- Intermediate
- Length
- Session
- Tags
- culture
Abstract, as submitted
This talk covers best and worst practices for Platform engineering. The trick is, we didn't always use this phrase, so we actually have many years of experience to learn from. Who are you? You're in a DevOps, wait, I mean SRE...nope, scatch that..."platform engineering" team. People are coming at you to get kubernetes up and running and then build some kind of platform on-top of kubernetes. But you just got a build pipeline in place! Getting kubernetes ready for developers may be a new problem, but building and running developer platforms has been going on for at least ten years. This talk will cover the lessons those organizations have learned such as: product managing the platform, attracting and retaining developers, seeding trust and skills, re-skilling existing ops staff, and more. Examples are drawn from organizations like Mercedes-Benz, the US Airforce, large insurance companies and banks, and more.
This is the text that went into the CFP form, kept as submitted - not a later rewrite of it. Talks get retitled and reworked between submission and stage, so what was actually delivered may differ.
Notes to the CFP reviewers
Not part of the public abstract - this is what the program committee saw and the audience never does.
I need to ask around, but I'd probably recruit a co-speaker, someone who has actually run platforms for several years. It'd depend on their availability. There's someone who ran a platform group at The Home Depot that'd I ask first, or maybe from Sky UK or UBS bank, depending on their availability and travel budget.