Platform Engineering Monthly — June 2024
Welcome to the seventh edition of Platform Engineering Monthly, thanks for being here! P.S. Suggestions or ideas for the next edition? Let me know!
📰 News
PlatformCon 2024! — The annual PlatformCon has come and gone, but left behind a plethora of helpful videos wherever you are on your Platform Engineering journey. You can find the videos broken down by helpful playlists here, definitely worth checking out!
Blog - Private Cloud Compute: A new frontier for AI privacy in the cloud - Apple Security Research — Fascinating read on how Apple is trying to provide a trustworthy (sounding), private cloud, with attempts at making verifiable builds of compute available to security engineers. It’s a shame they aren’t open sourcing any of it, and others could take a leaf out of Apple’s book with relation to protecting user data.
10 Years Since Kubernetes Launched at DockerCon | Docker — 10 years of Kubernetes, and it’s interesting to see a recent survey has shown that 48% of Users Struggle With Tool Choice.
Amazon Cloud Traffic Is Suffocating Fedora's Mirrors - Phoronix - A disappointing reminder that cloud companies need to be responsible citizens for the Open Source providers they so heavily rely on for their business.
Broadcom ends easy elasticity for VMware Cloud on AWS • The Register — The Broadcom acquisition continues to go about as well as expected, this time taking a swipe at AWS, and ultimately the customer is paying the price.
OpenAI Selects Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to Extend Microsoft Azure AI Platform — It’s interesting OpenAI has selected Oracle to extend its infrastructure out to, hopefully this isn’t just a case of offsetting compute to another corporation to protect sustainability targets. Also of note is Google’s new partnership with Oracle.
🧑🎓 Case Studies / Papers
Measuring Developer Experience With a Longitudinal Survey — Google is essentially using surveys to get feedback, but with some constraints to ensure consistency. A refreshing, pragmatic approach that smaller companies could adopt relatively easily. Abi Noda summary here.
AI-Assisted Assessment of Coding Practices in Modern Code Review — An interesting application of “AI” if nothing else, Abi Noda summary here.
Resolving Code Review Comments with Machine Learning — Again, hugely grateful for Abi Noda's summary here, which boils down to using ML to assist engineers in code edits based on PR comments.
📅 Events
Platform engineering: start from the backend! — July 2nd, 7pm GMT
The platform engineer's survival guide to Kubernetes networking — July 9th, 7pm GMT
Backstage is not your platform — July 16th, 7pm GMT
How to build a Minimum Viable Platform (MVP) in four phases — July 23rd, 7pm GMT
🦮 Tutorials / How-tos
Compute Engine spend optimization part 2 | Google Cloud Blog — A nice guide that provides some fairly pragmatic steps to get your costs down. If it’s of value, part 1 is here.
Five ways Amazon Q simplifies AWS CloudFormation development | AWS DevOps Blog — I hesitantly recommend any AI products to be honest, but there’s a few potentially useful specific use cases here that are worth checking out.
Building a Platform Team at a 153-Year-Old Company - The New Stack — Fascinating read on how a company with a lot of ageing technology (anyone remember IBM Websphere?) rolled out Platform Engineering. The challenges are as much cultural as they are technical.
PlatformCon: How Spotify Manages Infrastructure with GitOps - The New Stack — Some insights into how Spotify utilises Git Ops and how Backstage fits into it.
Blue/Green Deployments to Amazon ECS using AWS CloudFormation and AWS CodeDeploy | AWS DevOps Blog — A surprisingly challenging topic due to CloudFormation limitations, so this is worth a read if you’re looking to expand your ECS offering to support Blue/Green deployments.
📁 Interesting Projects
glasskube — A new package manager for Kubernetes. Looks like a refreshing new way to handle dependencies in Kubernetes. Worth a look!
📚 Reader’s Corner
Platform Engineering on Kubernetes — How to apply the principles of Platform Engineering on Kubernetes.
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.