Platform Engineering Monthly — November 2024
Welcome to the twelfth edition (1 whole year 🎉) of Platform Engineering Monthly! Thanks for being here! Suggestions or ideas for the next edition? Let me know!
Platform Engineering Monthly - November 2024 Edition
Welcome to the latest edition of Platform Engineering Monthly, thanks for being here! P.S. Suggestions or ideas for the next edition? Let me know!
📰 News
Amazon S3 adds new functionality for conditional writes - AWS — This feature has been long overdue in AWS, and before you get excited, there are some caveats. It’s for express zone one, which is more expensive and far less highly available. Hopefully AWS can roll this out to other storage classes and eventually catch-up with Azure from about 10 years ago…
What causes 'bad days' for developers? - by Abi Noda — The top cause of engineer "bad days"? Unreliable tools, infrastructure issues, and slow processes. The impact of this on engineers? Decreased productivity, more stress, and more self-doubt.
Dear friend, you have built a Kubernetes — Some insights on how you can over-engineer an internal solution where something more off-the-shelf (like K8s) can give you the same value. However, the premise that the only alternative to K8s is a big pile of shell scripts is suspect.
The 2024 State of Platform Engineering? Fledgling at Best - The New Stack — This sounds fairly dire, but I think the summary here is “if you’re doing it well, you’re doing it really well and to do it well you need to listen to your customers”. For full disclosure, this is a summary of a very interesting chat in the Platform Engineering Slack Community, which you should definitely join. If you want to delve further into this topic, it’s worth reading up on Platform as a Product.
I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and was Charged $1,100 - Moving Forward — AWS is a large company with lots of teams and solution architects creating tutorials. These things will always fall through the gaps, and until AWS enables hard spending limits, this will remain an issue.
We’re leaving Kubernetes — GitPod does a good job breaking down why, for their use-case, Kubernetes was not the best solution for them.
📅 Events
AWS Re:Invent (Here’s a handy guide for anyone attending) — December 2 – 6, 2024 in Las Vegas, Nevada
December seems to be a quiet month. If you’ve got interesting events you’d like to add, reach out to me or leave a comment!
🎙️ Webinars
Platform Engineering Executive Roundtable during AWS re: Invent, Las Vegas (Kaspar Von Grünberg, Humanitec; Rickey Zachary, Thoughtworks) — December 3, 2024
Multi-cloud Platform Engineering with Crossplane — December 3, 2024 7:00 pm (CET)
Win at Platform Engineering with Minimum Viable Platforms (MVPs) — December 4, 2024 7:00 pm (CET)
State of Platform Engineering in 2024: Salary, AI, and more — December 10, 2024, 7:00 pm (CET)
🦮 Tutorials / How-tos
How To Track DORA Metrics in an Internal Developer Portal - The New Stack — This is timely as the DORA report is show that a lot of organisations aren’t thinking about their customers and aren’t measuring outcomes.
Platform Engineering: A Guide for Technical, Product, and People Leaders: Fournier, Camille, Nowland — This book is making the rounds as an excellent resource for platform engineering. You may recognise Camille from several excellent Engineering Manager books, in particular The Managers Path.
📁 Interesting Projects
awslabs/kro: kro | Kube Resource Orchestrator — Kro lets you define reusable ResourceGroups that automate the orchestration and management of resource dependencies within a cluster.
awslabs/harmonix: A developer portal to meet your Enterprise needs — AWS with a Backstage frontend. Definitely a project to watch.
Have insights, stories, projects, feedback, or tips on platform engineering you'd like to share? 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.