Platform Engineering Monthly — January 2024
Welcome to the second edition of Platform Engineering Monthly, thanks for being here! P.S. Suggestions or ideas for the next edition? Let me know!
📰 News
Good DevEx increases productivity. Here is the data. — Github partners with DX to clarify the impact of DevEx with a pretty impressive statement that “developers who carve out significant time for deep work enjoy a 50% productivity boost” the rest of the article highlights various strategies that can be deployed to achieve this productivity boost.
Developer productivity metrics at 17 tech companies — Abi Noda writes a piece on the Pragmatic Engineer about the developer productivity metrics used at tech companies. What’s great about this article is it shows clear examples of metrics being used and how they are employed.
2024 State of Internal Developer Portals — Port has published a state of IDPs and provides some compelling evidence from the survey that Platform Engineering continues to be prioritised in organisations.
Continuous Integration - Martin Fowler has published a big set of updates on his thoughts on Continuous Integration this month. It’s definitely worth a read.
Unleash Your Cloud Potential: AWS's New Free Badges Guide — AWS has released some new free badges, this article breaks down what you’ll learn and is worth a review if you’re interested in some free upskilling.
re:Invent 2023 DevOps and Developer Productivity Playlist — Technically from 2023, but Brian Beach has put together a great index of events from re:Invent that makes it easy to pick and choose what’s worth your time.
GitOpsCon Europe 2023 and beyond! — Another index of an event, this time GitOpsCon.
🧑🎓 Case Studies / Papers
Developer Productivity for Humans, Part 7: Software Quality — This paper describes how Google is tacking the challenging metric of quality when defining developer productivity. Abi Noda has another great summary here.
📅 Events
Loom’s nightmare AWS outage and how it could have been prevented — Thu, Feb 1, 2024, 6:00 PM GMT
Minimum Viable Platform at enterprise scale — Tue, Feb 6, 2024 at 6:00 PM GMT
From 50 Shades of APIs to the least shady — Thu, Feb 15, 2024 at 6:00 PM GMT
5 biggest Platform Manager fuckups — Thu, Feb 22, 2024 at 6:00 PM GMT
Multi-TenancyCon — Will be happening March 19, 2024 in Paris
🦮 Tutorials / How-tos
Best practices for scaling AWS CDK adoption within your organization — Quite a comprehensive guide on defining your platform’s operating model to delivering on it using CDK more effectively. Bring it to more “advanced” topics like multi-account and cross-region deployments in CDK. Definitely worth the read.
8 Top Docker Tips & Tricks for 2024 — Features some great tips for optimising your Docker workflow, highlighting a lot of Docker functionality I wasn’t aware of.
Understanding AWS IAM Roles for Beginners — Fairly comprehensive guide to IAM Roles in AWS. Worth a read to newcomers trying to understand the concepts or those looking for a refresher.
Platform Engineering from Minimum Viable Platform to scale — Video that describes how to get started with and de-risk delivery of your first Platform and how to scale from there. Worth a watch if you’re just getting started.
📁 Interesting Projects
Awesome Platform Engineering — An awesome list dedicated to Platform Engineering, a handy reference when you’re looking for a solution to your Platform problems! Includes things like tooling,
📚 Readers Corner
Platform Engineering: What You Need to Know Now — A freebie from The New Stack if you sign up to their letter.
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.