Platform Engineering Monthly — March 2024
Platform Engineering Monthly — March 2024
Welcome to the fourth edition of Platform Engineering Monthly, thanks for being here! P.S. Suggestions or ideas for the next edition? Let me know!
📰 News
Free data transfer out to internet when moving out of AWS | AWS News Blog — Whether AWS found a conscience or the EU strong-armed them, this is great news for customers. Bonus Azure post here too!
Reducing our AWS bill by $100,000 - Fathom Analytics — Interesting breakdown on costs, perhaps it might inspire others to follow suit. Remember, it’s not just savings in money, less cloud spend (typically) means a reduced environmental impact too!
AI Infrastructure Landscape — A helpful visualisation of all the infrastructure tooling going on in the AI space.
Improving Developer Experience Drives Profitability — Enabling flow state, tightening feedback loops, and reducing cognitive load and a great final message: “When in doubt, always trust your humans.”.
HashiCorp reportedly considering sale amid growing challenges — Concerning news around HashiCorp. Here’s hoping if there is a sale that the company continues to deliver great products!
11 Years of Docker: Shaping the Next Decade of Development — GenAI is being crowbarred into the next decade like everywhere else, but it’s good to see the focus on productivity and supply chain.
IAM is the worst — I mean, the title says it all.
🧑🎓 Case Studies / Papers
How (in)efficient are engineering organizations? — You can find the report here, but it looks like the waste (and therefore opportunity) in this space is staggering.
The cost of interrupted work: more speed and stress — And as usual Abi Noda’s great analysis here. I feel a little sceptical of this one if applied to software engineers. Writing an email is indeed mentally taxing, I’m not sure interrupted engineers would produce the same error rate as those not interrupted, nor do I feel they would work faster. Still interesting research nonetheless.
📅 Events
Google Cloud Next — April 9-11, 2024 in Las Vegas
Qcon — April 8-10, 2024 in London, UK
Building high-performing platform teams: a practical guide with real-world examples — April 2, 2024 at 7pm GMT
Build a Minimum Viable Platform (MVP) in four phases — Apr 9, 2024 at 7pm GMT
Serverless observability: where SLOs meet transforms — Apr 16, 2024 at 7pm GMT
Platform Engineering GTM strategy: From soup to nuts — Apr 30, 2024 at 7pm GMT
🦮 Tutorials / How-tos
Issuing a verifiable credential with Keycloak - Really thorough guide to issuing a verifiable credential with a shift towards user-controlled digital identity management.
Infrastructure as Code development with Amazon CodeWhisperer — Crank out Infrastructure as Code (IAC) with CodeWhisperer, supports CloudFormation, Terraform and CDK.
How to Scaffold a New Application with a Developer Portal — Solid guide on getting started with an IDP and defining practical Golden Paths for engineers.
How to set compliance controls for your Google Cloud Organization — Regulated workloads and in general having to operate under compliance controls can be such a thankless job, it’s great to see GCP trying to reduce the pain. Assured Workloads looks like an interesting approach.
📁 Interesting Projects
Regula — A tool that evaluates infrastructure as code files for potential AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Kubernetes security and compliance violations prior to deployment.
Checkov — On the same theme, Checkov prevents cloud misconfigurations and finds vulnerabilities during build-time in infrastructure as code, container images and open source packages
📚 Readers Corner
Stolen Focus — Not specifically Platform Engineering related, but a great book on how modern technology has impacted our ability to focus on as a species. What’s more relevant is the importance of flow state and how it is essential for humans to thrive. We often focus so heavily on productivity, but it’s important to remember building great platforms helps humans thrive!
Dishing the Data — A lot of new joiners from this great newsletter. Egor’s posts touch a lot of very relevant topics for Data Engineers. Highly recommend it!
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 for a chance to be featured in our next edition, or connect with me on LinkedIn.