Thread by @danielbryantuk

Key learnings from the inaugural #PlatformCon

- Everyone is building a platform, whether they realize it or not
- Platform as product FTW 🚀
- Getting exec/C-level buy-in is challenging
- Platform Product Manager will be a hot role 📈
- Balance devex, CLI, UIs, & IaC ⚖️

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1/ Everyone is building a platform, whether they realize it or not 🤔

There was a real mix of platform tech at the event:
- Kubernetes
- Serverless
- On-prem

One key theme: every "platform" helped devs to code, ship, and run, reducing toil and increasing speed and safety 🚀 ⛑️

A lot of (successful) platform builds and adoption appeared to be driven bottom-up by developers 🧰

And yes, even that janky "setup-local-dev. sh" script and clumsily assembled GitHub Actions building and deploying from your repo onto an EC2 instance count as a platform 😁

I learned a lot about the value of bottom-up platform and tooling adoption from Bo Daley, DevOps Platform Engineer in a recent @ambassadorlabs podcast 🎙️

getambassador.io/developer-cont…

@ambassadorlabs 2/ Platform as product FTW 🚀

All of the thought leaders agreed on this point, and this was best articulated by my buddy @manupaisable of @TeamTopologies fame in his talk:

@ambassadorlabs @manupaisable @TeamTopologies I also pitched "treat the platform as a product" as one of my top three requirements for building a platform in my #PlatformCon talk "From Kubernetes to PaaS to … err, what’s next?"

@ambassadorlabs @manupaisable @TeamTopologies 3/ Getting exec/C-level buy-in is challenging 💼

Several attendees asked about this. As others suggested, I believe the success of a platform as a product build will depend a lot on getting the right product manager to manage upwards as well as across eng (more details below)

@ambassadorlabs @manupaisable @TeamTopologies The #Platform talk by @JulyAte is a superb resource for learning more about getting exec buy-in 📊 💸

"How to convince management to invest in your platform"

@ambassadorlabs @manupaisable @TeamTopologies @JulyAte And @techiewatt's talk will help you convince your management that a well-designed and maintained platform (and community) can add a lot of value to the business 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

"People, Process & Platform - A community-focused approach"

@ambassadorlabs @manupaisable @TeamTopologies @JulyAte @techiewatt 4/ Platform Product Manager will be a hot role 📈

As I wrote in a previous article, platform engineering is sure to be a hot role over the next 12 years (notwithstanding some hiring pullback)

blog.getambassador.io/is-platform-en…

@ambassadorlabs @manupaisable @TeamTopologies @JulyAte @techiewatt I believe that the Platform Product Manager role will also blow up, but probably with a lag... 🐌

Based on my previous experience, I believe a lot of folks will not appreciate the benefits of a good PM and will instead power ahead with simply building things (🐢 vs 🐇)

@ambassadorlabs @manupaisable @TeamTopologies @JulyAte @techiewatt The Platform Product Manager will attract a lot of senior ops and devex-motivated folks 🛠️ 🏎️

Core skills:
- Empathy with developers
- Deep understanding of ops, tools, and platforms
- Biz awareness (KPIs, strategy, etc)
- Internal devrel skills
- Project management

@ambassadorlabs @manupaisable @TeamTopologies @JulyAte @techiewatt 5/ Balance devex, CLI, UIs, & IaC ⚖️

There was a lot of great discussion about how to balance CLI and UI, and IaC and "magic config"

There was some rough consensus:

@ambassadorlabs @manupaisable @TeamTopologies @JulyAte @techiewatt If you're building a bare-bones DIY platform, start with a CLI, iterate and get acceptance from your devs, and then invest in a UI

If you're buying/adopting an Internal Developer Portal (IDP) or Developer Control Plane (DCP) you should start UI first.

@ambassadorlabs @manupaisable @TeamTopologies @JulyAte @techiewatt There was some confusion about how adopting a UI/IDP/DCP with good devex might force the platform team to give up IaC, GitOps, and audit trails of config changes in git ⚠️

I think you can have both, as long as your platform auto-generates config and issues PRs to your repos

@ambassadorlabs @manupaisable @TeamTopologies @JulyAte @techiewatt We took this approach with Ambassador Cloud.

You can canary release on K8s (with @argoproj CD) and update ingress mappings (with Emissary-ingress) via the UI, and behind the scenes we generate the updated YAML and config and issue a PR against your repo

getambassador.io/products/ambas…

@ambassadorlabs @manupaisable @TeamTopologies @JulyAte @techiewatt @argoproj If you want to read more of my thoughts on the importance of developer experience with cloud platforms, be sure to check out this @thenewstack article:

thenewstack.io/taming-the-clo…

@ambassadorlabs @manupaisable @TeamTopologies @JulyAte @techiewatt @argoproj @thenewstack And that's it for my #PlatformCon takeaways! Be sure to reply and share yours

@ambassadorlabs @manupaisable @TeamTopologies @JulyAte @techiewatt @argoproj @thenewstack Kudos to @luca_cloud and the entire #PlatformCon team for running a great event! I hope to be back for the next event.

You can find the entire list of on-demand PlatformCon videos below:
youtube.com/channel/UCKjVI…

@ambassadorlabs @manupaisable @TeamTopologies @JulyAte @techiewatt @argoproj @thenewstack @luca_cloud Thanks for reading this far! Please reach out if you have any questions 🙏