Platform Engineering Monthly — May 2024
Welcome to the sixth edition of Platform Engineering Monthly, thanks for being here! P.S. Suggestions or ideas for the next edition? Let me know! Short reminder, check out the new(ish) podcast I co-host: Hybrid Cloud Show. 🎤
📰 News
Introducing customizable observability dashboards | Google Cloud Blog —
Google Cloud continues to progress observability with this ability to customize your console with in-context dashboards. This looks incredibly helpful when offering a platform for engineers to better understand what's going on with their systems!New Spotify Portal for Backstage Eases Platform Engineering - The New Stack — It looks like Spotify is offering (invite-only) backstage in a box, with wizards to get you up and running. Backstage is often touted as being painful to set up, so this could really see its adoption drastically increase if the onboarding friction is reduced.
Dynamic Configuration Patterns for Platform Engineering Teams - Wahl Network — This is worth a read on the particularly tricky topic of platform configuration and gets to the very heart of some of the serious scaling challenges that Platform Engineers face.
DevEx Success: How Pfizer Scaled to 1,000 Engineers - The New Stack —
Interesting read on how Pfizer scaled in a very strategic manner with careful curation, rolled scaled from 100 to 1,000 engineers. I'm envious of how methodical the process is, with culture and technology evolving in tandem.Holes in Your Bitbucket: Why Your CI/CD Pipeline Is Leaking Secrets | Google Cloud Blog — Good recommendations from this article and off the back of the CircleCI security leak a while ago, this serves as a good reminder to heed these recommendations.
Cloudflare took down our website after trying to force us to pay $120k within 24h — Details aside, a reminder that trying to stay vendor-agnostic may be what saves your bacon. Business continuity is no joke!
🧑🎓 Case Studies / Papers
The science behind DORA — The lead DORA researcher, Derek DeBellis, goes into the history and context of DORA, worth a read, especially if you intend on utilsing DORA metrics at your organisation.
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
PlatformCon 2024 (The one not to miss!) — 10th-14th June 2024
Landing Zone 102: From the Application Team Request to Final Cloud Environment — June 19, 2024, 10:00 AM GMT
Port Talks — 2-day virtual event all about developer experience and internal developer portals hosted by Port — June 26th-27th
🦮 Tutorials / How-tos
Cloud strategies for the best cost and results: public vs private vs hybrid cloud | CNCF — Are your cloud hosting bills terrifying you each month? It's worth reviewing this article, it's quite high level, but the conclusion is fairly straightforward: "If it were 2014 instead of 2024, there would be a case to be made that the hassle of private cloud outweighs the cost savings. But that’s just no longer the case."
A step-by-step guide to securely upgrading your EKS clusters | CNCF — The guide includes some very helpful step-by-step upgrade sequences and advice on building checklists to get through the upgrade process.
📁 Interesting Projects
pyinfra — pyinfra automates infrastructure tasks quickly and at scale, looks like an interesting option for vending out systems if you want to stay in the Pythonic world.
📚 Readers Corner
Building Evolutionary Architectures: Support Constant Change — This book focuses on creating systems that can evolve over time, a key aspect of effective platform engineering.
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.