7 Ways to Fail at Building a Platform
Given at WeAreDevelopers World Congress Berlin on
Building your own internal developer platform can seem attractive, but it's a risky proposition. In a platform as a product approach, when you build it, you own it, and now you're in the business of developing a product instead of your actual business. In this talk, drawing from 10 years of platform engineering case studies of large organizations, Coté will go over seven risks of building your own platform: expansive scopes, underestimating cost, project mindsets, death by customization, skills, security and compliance, resume-driven development. You can learn from the many people who've suffered these risks already and, hopefully, avoid them yourself.
Slides
Further Resources
- The Upside-Down Economics of DIY PaaS - Seven pitfalls of building your own platform
- 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.
- TryTanzu.ai - platform running thousands of apps