Platform Engineering Monthly — July 2024
Welcome to the eight edition of Platform Engineering Monthly, thanks for being here! P.S. Suggestions or ideas for the next edition? Let me know!
📰 News
Microsoft: Linux Is the Top Operating System on Azure Today - The New Stack — It might never be the year of Linux on the desktop, but this is a pretty compelling success for Linux and cements it as the operating system for Cloud Tech.
Dear AWS, please let me be a cloud engineer again – Luc van Donkersgoed's Notes — A fairly damning article around how AWS has pointed the ship towards AI at the detriment of what made it a success in the first place.
How DevProd teams got funded: 20 real-world examples — If you’re at an organisation starting to get an appetite for Platform Engineering and aren’t sure where to start to try and get some compelling wins, this is a good read.
Kubernetes 1.31 - What’s new? | Sysdig — Nice summary by Sysdig, it’s interesting to see that in this release the core of K8’s codebase is now decoupled from cloud vendors. Here’s hoping the investment in these now “external” dependencies continues without much impact.
The New Internet | Tailscale — Whilst I wouldn’t agree with everything written here, it’s a thought-provoking piece on technology and how perhaps we may think we’re heavily optimising for scale but are in fact optimising for complexity. Accepting slow, complex builds to deploy systems that have a scaling potential far beyond what is ever needed.
🧑🎓 Case Studies / Papers
State of Developer Experience 2024 - by Abi Noda — Perhaps somewhat related to the Tailscale post above. Engineers are losing a day a week due to inefficiencies, and build systems are the third-highest contributor.
Decentralized decision-making and scaled autonomy at Spotify - ScienceDirect — An interesting piece on the conflicts of autonomy vs alignment. Also, an interesting insight is the struggles Spotify has with decoupling dependencies between teams. Abi Noda’s usual summary and an excellent table on levels of autonomy is here.
📅 Events
The HOWs & WHATs of DORA — July 31st, 11:00 am - 11:45 am EDT
4000 microservices, 8 million customers, 1 Internal Developer Platform — Aug 7th, 7:00 pm - 7:45pm CEST
The ABCs of building a Minimum Viable Platform (MVP) — Aug 20th, 7:00 pm - 7:45pm CEST
GenAI for observability in the serverless world — Aug 27th, 7:00 pm - 7:45pm CEST
🦮 Tutorials / How-tos
I installed Kubernetes on my old PC - here’s how I did it — Neat guide on installing Kubernetes on very limited hardware.
Streamlining Continuous Delivery with Argo CD (Git Ops): A Guide with Code Examples | by Sumit Kaul - Medium - Tutorial on Getting Argo CD up and running with Kubernetes.
Platform Teams: Automate Infrastructure Requirement Gathering - The New Stack — An article on The New Stack from the nitric team (so it's heavily biased towards that technology); however, in general it's an interesting idea to try to generate requirements based on actual code.
How To Put Developer Survey Results Into Action - The New Stack — Often a challenge to take a lot of input from developer feedback and turn it into something prioritised and actionable, this is a great intro to the topic.
Troubleshooting GKE Networking Connectivity issues | Google Cloud Blog — A really helpful breakdown for the thorny issue of networking issues in Kubernetes!
📁 Interesting Projects
Talos Linux — A Linux flavour designed specifically for Kubernetes, it’s fairly minimal, hardened (no shell access) and interestingly, immutable.
aws/aws-secretsmanager-agent: The AWS Secrets Manager Agent — There’s often concerns using secrets manager directly from an app, API calls can get expensive, this new tool from AWS provides a local HTTP service that you can install and use in your compute environments to read secrets from Secrets Manager and cache them in memory.
AWS IAM Policy Visualizer — A nice way to visualise your IAM policies. Any tool to help better understand the labyrinth is welcome!
📚 Reader’s Corner
Build: Elements of an Effective Software Organization | Swarmia — How to build effective software organisations. There's also a free online version available that appears to be well-structured and comprehensive.
Have insights, stories, projects, feedback, or tips on platform engineering you'd like to share? I’ll share them in the Reader's Corner! Drop me a line by replying to this email for a chance to be featured in our next edition, or connect with me on LinkedIn.