Platform Engineering Monthly — December 2023
Hey there! 👋 I'm Shane, and I'm excited to share the first issue of our monthly journey through the world of platform engineering. This newsletter is all about the latest trends, insights, and resources in our field – whether you're a seasoned expert or just starting out.
Each month, I'll bring you a mix of news, case studies, upcoming events, and cool projects to keep you in the know. But this isn't a one-way street – I'd love to hear from you, too. Feel free to share your thoughts, feedback, or anything exciting you've come across in platform engineering. As it was the holidays, I opted to send Decembers newsletter in January but expect this newsletter to come out on the final Tuesday of the month.
Let's dive in and explore together!
P.S. Suggestions or ideas for the next edition? Let me know!
📰 News
85% of Engineers Say They’ll Use an IDP in 2024 — The New Stack — Good article on the demand of IDPs (Internal Developer Platform) and what key pillars make up an IDP. It’s encouraging to see more interest in IDP, hopefully this leads to more competition and solutions in this space.
The Best Of Engineering Enablement 2023 — by Abi Noda — Great summary of posts on enabling engineers from the last year, helpfully categorised.
Year in Review: Platform Engineering Still Run By Spreadsheet — The New Stack — Interesting insight that a huge amount of IDPs are just spreadsheets, a sign of an industry that's still in its infancy. It also highlights the huge opportunity there is in this space for a solution (or solutions) to replace these spreadsheets.
On platform adoption: essential mindsets and approaches — A very thoughtful piece on building platforms and how to get adoption to maximise impact.
Docker 2023: Milestones, Updates, and What's Next | Docker — Great summary of 2023 by Docker, they’ve achieved quite a lot and this gives a great breakdown of Docker as a product and a company.
The Hype Train Is Over. Platform Engineering Is Here to Stay — The New Stack — Great news along with compelling evidence that the demand for Platform Engineering is skyrocketing.
🧑🎓 Case Studies / Papers
Case Studies | Uzufly built E2E testing for serverless web app with distributed traces — Using traces for testing serverless apps. It presents a very visual solution to a common pain-point in distributed applications, tracing issues across multiple systems using various technology stacks.
Developer Productivity for Humans, Part 6: Measuring Flow, Focus, and Friction for Developers | IEEE — Presents a compelling solution to a very challenging problem in the Platform Engineering space, how to quantify developer productivity through flow and friction. Here is also a great analysis of the paper by Abi Noda at getdx here.
📅 Events
Register now! PlatformCon will be happening again on June 10-14, 2024.
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe will be happening on March 19 – 22 2024.
Qcon London will be happening April 8–10, 2024.
Google Cloud Next register early, it will be happening April 9-11, 2024 in Las Vegas.
Platform Engineering from Minimum Viable Platform to scale — Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 6:00 PM GMT
Keeping it DRY with your Terraform code — Tue, Jan 16, 2024, 6:00 PM GMT
kubectl apply -f cloud-Infrastructure.yaml with Crossplane et al — Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 6:00 PM GMT
🦮 Tutorials / How-tos
Blue/Green Deployments with Amazon ECS using Amazon CodeCatalyst | AWS DevOps Blog — Nice article on using CodeCatalyst, Amazon’s all in one build and deployment solution (and much more). It’s still a relatively new tool, but these sorts of integrated capabilities highlight what Amazon can provide.
Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading | incident.io — A very fun guide on tracking metrics locally and proof engineers are highly motivated to get the latest toys!
Pass the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Certification in One Week — Might be a bit optimistic but a pretty logical guide to getting yourself up to speed and pass an AWS certification.
📁 Interesting Projects
Projen — AWS's project generator. Bootstrapping repos can it make it's hard to keep centralised control and make rollout of change difficult, but this seems a relatively well controlled middle ground.
Torii — It’s in early stages, but Torii is a simple, powerful and extensible open-source Internal Developer Portal. One to watch in the future.
📚 Readers Corner
Team Topologies — As it’s the first edition, I’ll highlight this essential read on organisational structure and the need for Platform Engineering.
Got insights, stories, projects, or tips on platform engineering? Share them in the Reader's Corner! Drop me a line for a chance to be featured in our next edition, or connect with me on LinkedIn.