7 Ways to Fail at Building a Platform
Given at the DevOps Amsterdam meetup on .
Everyone's thinking about building an AI platform right now: one place to run all the new apps that takes care of security, governance, deployment and monitoring. And, of course, the instinct is to build it yourself. Drawing on ten years of platform engineering at large organizations, this talk goes over seven ways building your own platform goes wrong: unexpected scope, underestimating the ongoing cost, treating the platform as a project, developer-built platforms (the day two hangover), keeping skilled people, resume-driven development, and keeping up with security and compliance.
Slides
Further Resources
- The Upside-Down Economics of DIY PaaS - Seven pitfalls of building your own platform
- Platform as a Product - platform as a product from 2017 to 2026.
- CNCF Platform Engineering Maturity Model - goals and milestones for your platform team.
- Coté's Books - going over how large organizations get better at software, most are free.
- Running Claude Agents on VMware Tanzu Platform - a reference architecture for hosting the Claude Agent SDK on a private, governed platform.
- Protect your registries for AI use, and humans too with TrueSource Spring Enterprise by Broadcom and TrueSource Trusted Artifacts.