Exploring PlatformCon: The Future of Platform Engineering with Camille Fournier

Hey, everyone. We're back here. Live a platform Con Day in New York City.

Glad you're joining us. com. That's a tough one.

And, and join in all the fun. You get all the sessions that are here, plus all of the sessions that have been going on and they've been going on all week. In the meantime though, let me introduce you to our next guest.

Her name is Camille Forer. Forer, yes. Yep.

Got it. You got it right? You got It.

Yep. Camille Is a multi-time, uh, author. She her newest book we're gonna talk about in a second.

But first, let's welcome her. Camille welcome. Thank you to the show.

Thanks for being here on Techstrong TV with us. Yeah. Um, tell us a little bit about you, your background.

Sure. Yeah. So I've been in tech for a long time, uh, and I've been here in New York City for a long time.

So I've had a tech career that spanned finance startups, uh, nonprofits even. So I've done a lot of different things. Um, and, uh, I've also written a number of books.

I've been a CTO, I've been a leader. I wrote the book, the Manager's Path for O'Reilly. I edited the book 97 Things Everyone Should Know About Engineering Management.

That's a mouthful. And my most recent book is actually about platform engineering. So it's called Platform Engineering, A Guide for Technical Product and People Leaders.

And it's also an O'Reilly book that I wrote with a co-author, Ian Noland. I'm sorry, the co-author's name. His Name is Ian Noland.

Very cool. Yeah. So I guess I, it begs the question, what's a nice girl like you writing a platform engineering book for, you know, what, what drove you to Yeah, yeah.

Write it. So I, first of all, I love platform engineering, so I've been doing it on and off. I would say that's kind of the technology area that I'm most passionate about.

I worked on the Apache Zookeeper project as an open source contributor in one of my jobs. And I've just been, I've always been in interested in kind of that space of software, sort of down stack software development. Mm-hmm.

Um, and I ran, uh, I've run several sort of platform engineering types of organizations. Um, and so I started running these organizations about, uh, 2017. Um, and at this time, like not, people didn't call talk about platform engineering that much, so it sort of became a trending term.

Um, and first it was like, oh, Kubernetes is platform engineering. And more recently it's like IDPs, our platform engineering. So it sort of felt like platform engineering turned into more of like a, like a vendor keyword search than an actual practice.

But as someone who has done work in this space for a long time and run big teams in this space, I actually think that it's, you know, it's a way of working. It's a way of solving some of the really big problems that engineering teams have today, particularly at scale, where we just have a huge amount of complexity that software engineers are expected to navigate to get their jobs done. And I believe that platform engineering is one of the, a modern approach to helping to kind of manage that complexity.

Um, and so, you know, I wrote this book, I wrote this book with my co-author Ian, who we worked together at one of our jobs, and then he went and ran, uh, a big platform team at Datadog. And so we have a lot of working experience doing this. And the book is not about like the technology specifics.

The book is about all of the challenges that people have when you're actually trying to build and execute these teams. Because these types of teams and these projects are, I think, a little bit different than your average kind of application engineering space. They have a lot of their own nuances and complexity, and we wanted to make it possible for people to have kind of a reference for how to solve some of these problems.

You know, you said, you said a lot of things in there. Let me unpack a little bit. Yeah.

So first of all, I, I gotta tell you, you're the, uh, I don't know, third interview we've done today. I was interviewing a woman a little earlier. She's the SVP of engineering at temporal.

Okay. Temporal. Yep.

Excuse me. Yep. Pretty.

And said something very similar to what you said, which was, I've been managing platform engineering teams for 20 plus years, but yet, so I'm older than you. But you know, you look out at the audience here, if you were to ask some of the younger folks at this audience, they'll say, well, platform engineering's a new thing, right? Yep.

It's, you know, three years old, four years old, whatever. Yep. How do we, how do we reconcile people who say, Hey, I've been doing platform engineering platform man managing platform teams for 25 plus years.

What are these people? What are these? You know, people missing that.

Well, I do think that when you're young, you, you sometimes lack, and I'm not banging on young people. No, no, No. But I do think when you're young, sometimes you lack the perspective of having worked for a long time and seen that actually nothing is ever totally new under the sun.

And things that seem new are often just rebrandings of old concepts. I mean, Repackaging, you know, I micro remember microservices, right? Yeah.

No, no, I, yeah. You know, it's not like people weren't doing services before. And yes, microservices have certain nuance differences, but like in reality building service, we Called it multi-threaded, you Know, building service oriented systems was not a totally brand new concept.

No. Everybody treated it like, oh my God, this massive innovation. Um, you know, I think right now, the though with platform engineering in particular, I really do think platform engineering is not a super new concept.

I think the branding is new-ish. Like I do think that the Kubernetes project really accelerated people thinking about platform engineering. And I actually, my theory is that it did that because Kubernetes actually enables you to really easily run multi-tenant infrastructure yourself.

So even if you're not a cloud provider, it sort of allows you to think about, oh, like here's how we can kind of think about this sort of multi-tenancy and these plugins, and you can have lots of different teams really working in this sort of, this, this particular type of way. Actually, I think it's just an interesting, um, it was an interesting like technical evolution that it made, it made it more like, uh, more popular for more types of teams to think about and start to adopt. And of course you have the cloud and all that other stuff Sure.

As well. Um, but sorry, that was a very bad explanation of of No, I get It. I'm Kubernetes, so apologies to the audience.

I, you know, And, and to the original Google team, right? To the original Google team. But like, they did something pretty unique that made it easier to build some much more complex platform type software in an open source way without hitting all of the problems that your older open source software.

Like I said, I was an Apache zookeeper contributor, right? Mm-hmm. One of the big challenges of running zookeeper as a service was having lots of different teams using it and, you know, causing each other problems, right?

When they, one team would DDoS the entire company because of the way they were actually accessing that underlying open source, right? And so I actually think that, you know, this was one of the first major open source projects that started to think about and solve that problem. And that is actually pretty important for really thinking about platform engineering of the, the way we think about it today.

So, um, now of course, though, I think the thing that bothers me most is actually Kubernetes popularizing platform engineering made it a little narrow, but I sort of got it. I'm not a big fan at all of IDPs as platform engineering. That's the, that feels like that's the latest vendor term.

Yeah, it is. And I think that's way too shallow. Like I just think that is a, that is an even shallower way of looking at platforms.

Uh, so I have some views on Yeah. Surprise. Yeah.

Um, I think that is what that IDP is platform engineering comes right out of the developer as the alpha predator in the pact view of things. True. Right.

That everything we do is to service the developer. Yeah. And so therefore we have this whole platform engineering and the platform engineering team here to make the developer Yeah.

A better top predator. Yeah. There's more to life than there is to organizations.

Yes. The developer, not to say they're not important. They are.

Yeah. Yeah. Another thing you, you know, we, you mentioned microservices.

Yeah. To me, when I look at platforms and platform engineering Yes. Kubernetes, the orchestrator Yeah.

Was, was a big piece of that. Yeah. There were, there were other orchestrators.

There were Cher and Docker, so Yeah. Mesos. Yep.

And then actually the whole docker container thing Yeah. Itself, in my mind was the progenitor true? That kind of ignited that whole, yeah.

This whole thing. Um, so when, when I look at what we, you know, today call platform engineering, if you wanna call all the other three things I spoke about cloud native, 'cause that's what a lot people Yeah. It's just cloud native on top of what you've been doing in platform or Yeah.

One of my like mentors, I, I sold comp my first company to him, and then he found, he funded every company I ever ah, did. It's my friend Brad Feld. Brad is a founder of Techstars.

Yeah. Actually has a new book out. Just came out this week about mentoring of all things.

Yeah. Um, but he always said, Alan, everything we do in tech is 99% evolutionary. Yes, yes.

There's very, very little revolutionary. Completely Agree. And, and I think this is a perfect example, You know, uh, it's so funny you say that I talked today is going to talk about how platform teams support the evolution of organizations and their usage of, you know, technology and they're not revolutionaries.

And, you know, I, you know, I think one of the big, uh, one of the mistakes we talk about in our book is the building, the V two system, the second system of XX and syndrome, old concept that every generation must rediscover and fail at multiple times in my experience. Um, and so I've, you know, I've been speaking about that topic actually for, for a while in my career. And lately, you know, I've been, we've been trying to talk about it in terms of platform teams, and one of the things we, we say is like, look, platform teams generally are made up of people who are very good at stabilizing and scaling and, you know, making software more usable and more efficient for more and more groups of people, um, which are really not the revolutionaries of your, of your company.

Right. Um, and so I actually think that, you know, one of the important things for platform engineers to recognize is we are not really revolutionaries, we are the evolutionary force, but if you do platform engineering, well, you can keep an organization evolving successfully, which is incredibly hard. Yes, it is at scale.

And for a long time, and I've worked at, you know, some big old companies with, you know, a, a, a, you know, long timelines of software and, you know, in those companies, you really wanna think about how do we make it easy for people to do the right new thing and to encourage movement into the new space. Sure. Right.

Without, you know, without saying, all right, you gotta, we're killing all of this stuff here and you're just moving it all tomorrow. It's like, let's, let's evolve and not just try to sort of, uh, dictate these timelines, you know? And, and these, I'm reminded one time I was talking with, uh, he was at the time the new CTO of Hertz.

Hmm. This is around 2009, 10 maybe. And he, he said, he said, Alan, we're moving to the cloud.

It hurts. I said, oh, you're migrating. We're not migrating.

I said, what do you mean you're not migrating? What are you doing? We're going with a clean start.

We're just building from scratch. Oh, good luck. Cloud Applications.

And then as soon as they're ready, we're just turning off. Yep. The data center ones and moving to that.

Yep. I told him the same thing. Good luck.

Of course, Hertz declared bankruptcy. He lost his job and everything else happened, you know, in the interim. Yep.

Not a, not a path to success. No, no. Very, very difficult, uh, very difficult lift.

That's Yeah. That's a, that's a juggling act. Yeah.

But I, I know you haven't had a chance to really get out on the floor and you, and you, you're talking this afternoon, but initially, I mean, look, keeping in mind that this is only the, in one of the in-person days of a full week of Yeah. Virtual sessions. What's the impression been?

You know, I think it's great right now. It feels like AI has sucked the air out of every room and every conversation. And, you know, look, I'm interested in AI too.

Of course we're all interested in it, but I love platforms. I love, like, I think this is actually still a really important area for people to be thinking about and working on and learning how to do better and adopting within their companies. And I don't think AI is just gonna magically make it that we don't need to understand how to build large systems and, you know, do big engineering projects, which is a lot of what platform engineering is.

So I'm really glad to see this energy here. I'm really glad to see, you know, to know that there are so many viewers for the videos and the content that's created, you know, at this event. I hope some of these people will buy my book because I think it's a pretty good book and it has a lot of good information in it.

Um, but you know, I, I've like, I am ready to talk about technology things that aren't just ai. And so I'm very excited to be here to do that. You know, we do a show every Monday to Friday, five days a week, text drug gangs on every day at nine 30, and it's three segments per day, sort of the view meets Fox and Friends meets Morning Joe.

So you, we get a little, it's a bunch of pundits just talking. Yep. It is so hard.

Yeah. So hard to just, 'cause the AI sucks the oxygen out of every conversation. Yep.

It seems, and like you, I I, I play with the too. I think it's gonna be huge. It's huge in media.

It's huge in so much, but you're right. It and it is good. Good to have that here.

Um, so how can people get your book? Yeah. Well you can buy it on Amazon.

Uh, we have a, uh, we are, so we were published by O'Reilly. So look at O'Reilly. If you have an O'Reilly Safari, sort of the online platform subscription, you can find it there, buy it on Amazon, Kindle.

I don't think the audio book is out quite yet, but it should be coming out soon. Um, and we are translated into a couple of different languages as well, if you want it in non-English. And hopefully soon there'll be a few more.

So, you know, look for it. Wherever fine technology books are sold. Your favorite book seller.

That's great, man. Camille, a pleasure. Thank you.

It was great meeting. Lovely to meet you. Camille Forer, did I get it right?

Yes, Yep. Got it Right. Author of the O'Reilly platform engineering book.

Go check it out wherever you buy your books from. We're live a platform Come, we're gonna be back here in a minute with more.