Daniel Bryant @ #KubeCon Profile picture
Jun 12 β€’ 20 tweets β€’ 23 min read
Key learnings from the inaugural #PlatformCon

- Everyone is building a platform, whether they realize it or not
- Platform as product FTW πŸš€
- Getting exec/C-level buy-in is challenging
- Platform Product Manager will be a hot role πŸ“ˆ
- Balance devex, CLI, UIs, & IaC βš–οΈ

πŸ§΅πŸ‘‡
1/ Everyone is building a platform, whether they realize it or not πŸ€”

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 πŸš€ ⛑️
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 πŸŽ™οΈ

getambassador.io/developer-cont…
@ambassadorlabs 2/ Platform as product FTW πŸš€

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 πŸ’Ό

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 πŸ“Š πŸ’Έ

"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 πŸ§‘β€πŸ€β€πŸ§‘

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

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

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 πŸ‡)
@ambassadorlabs @manupaisable @TeamTopologies @JulyAte @techiewatt The Platform Product Manager will attract a lot of senior ops and devex-motivated folks πŸ› οΈ 🏎️

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 βš–οΈ

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 πŸ™

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More from @danielbryantuk

May 30
#KubeCon EU Takeaway 2: ➑️ Platforms and β€œgolden paths” enable productivity and reduce developer friction

I saw several great talks, and also presented on why I think golden paths and platform engineering are the next big thing πŸ”₯

Let's explore this in more detail: 🧡 πŸ‘‡
The first mention of "golden paths" was from @MercedesBenz in the opening keynote, where they talked about the K8s-based platform they had built over the past 7 years 🏎️

Lots of thought, effort, and iteration had been applied to the dev experience 🧰

@MercedesBenz Golden paths are all about making it easy for a developer to code, ship, and run applications; to go from biz idea, to code, to test, to running in prod, to collecting telemetry to enable iteration ⚑

There can be one golden path or many, depending on your use cases πŸ›£οΈ
Read 15 tweets
May 29
My top five takeaways from #KubeCon:

1. Cloud education is vitally important
2. Platforms and β€œgolden paths” enable productivity
3. Developer experience is top of mind
4. Cloud networking is simplifying
5. Increasing focus on security

Let's explore 1 in more detail 🧡 πŸ‘‡
First, the complete #KubeConEU summary blog post that provides in-depth coverage can be found here:

blog.getambassador.io/kubecon-eu-202…
Takeaway 1 ➑️ The cloud native community continues to grow: Education is vitally important

@pritianka mentioned in her opening keynote that 65% of attendees were new to KubeCon. And a lot of these folks were new to the cloud native space

More, and new, education is needed
Read 12 tweets
Apr 29
My top Twitter threads on cloud, containers, and microservices for this year so far:

- Platform engineering
- API gateway vs service mesh
- @Kubernetesio debugging
- @Docker chaos testing
- Fast dev/test with Telepresence
- @buildpacks_io
- Microservice testing

A 🧡 of 🧡 s πŸ‘‡
I'm predicting big things for the "platform engineering" space over the next year. Whether you ❀️ or 😑 the name, I think this is the new DevOps.

Watch this space for lots of knowledge sharing, innovation, and VC money πŸ’° !

A critical part of your platform is the communication infrastructure ☎️

I think there is a lot of innovation -- and potential confusion -- in the cloud native API gateway and service mesh spaces (and n/s vs e/w 🧭 )

Read 9 tweets
Apr 22
Testing microservice-based systems is hard 😒

With that said, software testing in general is challenging, but to paraphrase the late great B.I.G.: "mo' services, mo' problems" πŸ’°

Here are some key references and thinking points 🧡 πŸ‘‡
I think a lot of testing challenges come with a misunderstanding about coupling and cohesion πŸ€”

As I wrote back in 2018, these two core architectural properties massively impact your ability to test: danielbryantuk.medium.com/microservice-t…
Think about coupling and cohesion when designing microservices (yeah, yeah, I know, but I mean seriously think about this, and even do some upfront design) 🎨

codingthearchitecture.com/2017/10/11/evo…
Read 12 tweets
Apr 14
Are you looking to perform simple chaos testing on your @Docker setup to check your system's and microservices' resilience and security?

For example, do you want to spike CPU, memory, i/o, in a container and see what happens?

My top three tools to get started with 🧡 πŸ‘‡
First, you'll need some basic visibility/observability into what's going on.

I've recently been using @bcicen_'s excellent "ctop" (shown in my first tweet): github.com/bcicen/ctop πŸ“Š

Once I've seen something obvious, then I run "docker container top 20fa446aebf..." πŸ”
The CPU burning container I'm showing above is using hub.docker.com/r/jfusterm/str…

There are a bunch of options to mess with CPU, memory, i/o 😁

(Note that this is a very old image, and although it's an Alpine base running simple Linux commands, this could still be a security risk)
Read 9 tweets
Apr 8
Looking to get fast feedback when testing microservices, but can't run all the services on your local machine? 🀯

Are you using @kubernetesio and stuck in a slow build-push-test cycle? 🐒

Let me show you the power of the new (beta) @Docker Desktop Telepresence extension 🧡 πŸ‘‡ Image
At last week's @Docker community all-hands, @scottcjohnston announced the new beta Docker Desktop extension functionality πŸ₯³

@gtardif followed this up with a great live demo πŸ™Œ

You can read more about this in my summary blog post: blog.getambassador.io/happy-birthday…
In a nutshell, @Docker desktop (DD) extensions enable partners (and in the future, you) to add exciting new functionality directly to the DD UI.

The @ambassadorlabs team was chosen as one of the first partners to try this out, and due to popular demand, we added Telepresence Image
Read 17 tweets

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