Platform Engineering Monthly — February 2024
Platform Engineering Monthly — February 2024
Welcome to the third edition of Platform Engineering Monthly, thanks for being here! P.S. Suggestions or ideas for the next edition? Let me know!
📰 News
Platform Engineering Dies in 4 Weeks - The New Stack — Oddly titled post on how to deliver a Platform with an MVP and fast iteration cycles. Helpful if you want to try to get something started at your company with a smaller amount of buy-in.
Import entire applications into AWS CloudFormation | AWS DevOps Blog — Taking a leaf out of Terraforms play book, AWS now lets you generate CloudFormation from your running applications. Definitely a nice start if you didn’t have the best IAC practice when your company began its cloud journey.
Announcing CDK Migrate: A single command to migrate to the AWS CDK | AWS DevOps Blog — Very related to the previous entry. You can also generate AWS CDK code from either CloudFormation Templates or resources directly in AWS.
Limitations in Measuring Platform Engineering with DORA Metrics - The New Stack — DORA has become a hugely popular set of metrics particularly in the Platform Engineering space, this article does a good job of highlighting the many blind-spots of DORA metrics.
AWS CodePipeline adds support for Branch-based development and Monorepos | AWS DevOps Blog — If you’re in the AWS Ecosystem, this is a very helpful piece of functionality, adding a lot more flexibility to your pipelines.
🧑🎓 Case Studies / Papers
Microsoft New Future of Work Report 2023 - Microsoft Research — If Steve Ballmer was on-stage he’d be shouting AI, AI, AI. Despite the heavy AI slant, it has some interesting insights, including on how dissemination of information being a more valuable skill set than context generation. Abi Noda has a great summary here.
Platform Engineering Services Market Size Reach USD 41.2 Billion by 2032 — A fascinating report on the opportunity in Platform Engineering Services, there are a few key players in the space right now. I expect more competition as the market continues to mature.
Using nudges to accelerate code reviews at scale — Nudges work, who knew? Abi Noda as usual has a great summary here.
📅 Events
Multi-TenancyCon —March 19, 2024 in Paris
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon — March 19 – 22 2024.
WTF! Internal Developer Platform vs Internal Developer Portal vs PaaS — March 7, 2024
Deploy containers fast with Azure Container Apps Landing Zone Accelerator — March 12, 2024
Microsegmentation for containers and microservices: best practices — Mar 26, 2024
🦮 Tutorials / How-tos
Best practices for managing Terraform State files in AWS CI/CD Pipeline | AWS DevOps Blog — It’s good to get best practice advice from AWS on this pain-point on managing Terraform state files within AWS.
Policy-as-Code in the software supply chain | CNCF — An interesting read if you’ve got compliance or regulatory requirements that could be applied as code.
How Do the Internal Developer Platform and Portal Connect? - The New Stack — So what does IDP really stand for? On the article doesn’t answer this but does give good guidance on what aspects each solve and how they should interact.
How Platform Engineering Supports SRE - The New Stack — How should Platform Engineering and Site Reliability interact?
Skills for [Platform] Product Managers - by Alex Craciun — If you are a Product Manager in the Platform Engineering space, or operating in that role, this is worth a read.
Creating infra using Backstage templates, Terraform and GitHub actions. | CNCF — A great hands-on guide that highlights how powerful Backstage can be.
📁 Interesting Projects
devops-exercises: Linux, Jenkins, AWS, SRE, Prometheus, Docker, Python, Ansible, Git, Kubernetes, Terraform, OpenStack, SQL, NoSQL, Azure, GCP, DNS, Elastic, Network, Virtualization. DevOps Interview Questions — Super helpful resource for getting some experience with various technologies in the Platform Engineering space.
📚 Readers Corner
The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win: Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford—I love this book. A lot of topics in our space can be quite dry, but this is a great read. I get something new every time I read this book.
Got insights, stories, projects, feedback or tips on platform engineering? I’ll 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.