Unlocking the Future of Platform Engineering – The Platform Engineering Show Ep 7

Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimmel for Techstrong, and welcome back to another episode of the Platform Engineering Show. org community. Uh, Luca, first of all, man, it's been too long.

I know between Cube Connor that I was at RSA and you were doing your thing. We have been globe traveling, but not I've had a chance to really sit down and talk for a while. Yes, yes.

It's been a while. Um, yeah, I mean, we've been, we've been really busy heads down. Um, you know, we've, we've just wrapped up the first, um, you know, we have this like two certifications right in the community, um, on engineer org.

One is this, this, um, this, the, you know, the, the usual kinda like practitioner and then you have the professional. Um, and it was the first cohort of the professional that we just wrapped up, which was really, really fun. Uh, so we've been heads down on that.

And then of course, you know, platform is coming up. So also work on that side. You know what, before we even get into what I want to talk about today, let's, let's just dig into those two things.

'cause they're important. Yeah. The certifications very important, right?

You know, I, I learned this when I did DevOps Institute in a large part of the world, and in many parts of the world, They don't just take your word for it, right? It's not just a question of what experience or where you work. They wanna know that you have some basic competencies.

And so having a certification, especially for younger people out here who are just breaking into industry, getting their first second jobs, it's so important, so important to have that kind of standard behind you, that stamp that says, Hey, it's not just me telling you I know how to do it. I actually demonstrated some proficiency in this. I, I, yes.

Studied on it. How can people, you know, look into, is this the right certification for them? How do they get started?

So, yeah, so yeah, so like CNCF, um, you know, also recently released this, this like, um, platform engineer associate or so, um, and there's like a bunch of other offerings in the market. And I think like the key thing is that most of those really focus on the tooling bit and the technical side of things. Um, which is of course, like a very important part of platform engineering because platform engineering is a technical thing, right?

You're building, you're building stuff, you need to be a developer and so on. But at the, but at the end of the day, you know, we've talked a lot of times on the show about the fact that, you know, we still have to see apart from engineer initiative really fail because of technical reasons. Because somebody put plum me over Terraform or whatever else.

It's almost never a tech challenge. It's like a cultural challenge, right? Like we said a lot of times.

And that's the thing, the thing that we really, you know, we have a lot of hands on labs and you know, you get your hands dirty. But also we spend a lot of time on the really the cultural bit and how do you actually get stakeholder buy in and you drive an entire initiative end to end in an organization. Um, which ultimately we believe it's, it's, you know, the applicable stuff and the stuff that we see a lot of people struggle with and a lot of teams struggle with.

And in fact, you know, we started this whole thing as, you know, some platform engineering courses like in August last year. Now they've morphed into your typical practitioner and professional, um, things. And they're instructor led eight weeks long.

Well, now we're ma we're making the pr the practitioner a little bit shorter, like four to six weeks. Um, you know, and it's more of a hybrid. It's the constructor led and, and self-paced.

But there are a lot of people, like a lot of uh, leaders has a platforms platform, product managers that have taken the course and they're like, Hey, hold on a second. I need my entire team to go through this. Right?

Um, and that's actually where we've now also in the last few months, rolled out this whole idea of like certifying teams, um, which, uh, this huge demand for both on the kinda like service provider front, um, as well as the, as well as the enterprise front. Um, and so we're actually going on site for a few days, spending time with them, and then they can still take the exam and so on. So that's been super cool and we've, we've learned a lot.

'cause you actually get to spend like an entire week, you know, deep diving with these people on their setups, what their challenges are, um, you know, and then of course we like cluster those learnings and, and the stuff that we write and so on. But it's, it's, it's super cool. org, people can like see more information, sign up, all that Good stuff.

Everything is there just like certifications. And then you land on university dopa do org, which is, you know, where we have our learning management system and you can create a user account and access all the courses and Excellent. There's a lot more coming, right?

Right now we, we have, and we're actually it something that we're gonna announce, um, apart from chron, uh, and in New York where you'll be as well, um, which is, uh, you know, we're gonna move past the core platform engineering track, um, and we're gonna add a lot of, you know, this like specialty courses. Um, there are gonna be deep dives that we do now with like, people like ThoughtWorks on leadership and, um, you know, vendors on specific things like infrastructure code and GitHubs and a bunch of other things. Um, so that people can really have that, those deep ties into the specific technical realm, but then always connect them up into this, you know, broader cultural topic that is platform engineer.

I love it. You mentioned platform Con, it's coming up, it's like a month away, a little, little more than a month away. Um, yes.

What's the latest? Give people, the people the dope here? Yeah, so the latest is, um, the, the agenda is the agenda for the live days is live on the website.

So, and there's three main tracks. Um, there's gonna be the, the main stage track where we have people like Gregor Hoppe, Kelsey Iow, Nikki Wat, uh, Camille Fornia. So really the best of the best in platform engineering are in the main stage.

Then we have workshops, um, that are gonna be hands-on workshop an hour long. You actually get to build stuff. And then we have trainings.

And the trainings I think are really nice because something that not, I, I, I think like in most conferences, you don't really see that. And it's really everything that we've learned from all the courses that we just talked about in the last 10 months and repackaged into this kind of like, live trainings in person. They're really designed for teams to do together.

Right. Um, and this is really cool. I think because we're seeing it's no longer just kinda like the platform that's buying a ticket and coming to check up the event, but actually, you know, they're, you know, you have all these like enterprise teams.

You have, you know, Google, NHL, uh, McDonald's, whatever, you know, they're buying like 6, 8, 10 tickets for their, for their entire team. And they kind of, um, as a team, which I think is really cool experience. Um, and I think it's gonna create a really nice vibe.

Yeah. Excellent. Excellent man.

I love it. Um, yeah, besides the in-person in New York, I wanna emphasize to people I do, you don't have to, there's an in-person in London, there's an in-person in Paris, an in-person in New York, but if you're not in those three cities, it's really a virtual event, right? So you don't, you don't miss anything, right?

You could see all exactly of these great, uh, sessions and everything, you know, on the, on the virtual side of it. com. Yeah.

com. Exactly. And, and it's free, you know, you can sign up, uh, you get access to everything.

Um, everything is gonna be on the website, on the YouTube channel, on the platform engineering YouTube channel. Um, and yeah, you know, if, if the, the the there, that's free, right? The ticket price is only if you want to come to attend live days.

'cause of course, you know, we're, we're curating a whole experience and you know, I'm really excited 'cause like last year when we did London, it was, you know, like, it, it was basically like a very big meetup, you know, two, 300 people, you know, super fun. But this is like a proper meeting conference, you know, full fledged. Like we're really, we're really going all, all out with, you know, with, with the build outs and, and you know, the, the, you know, there's gonna be some fun surprises and fun formats that we're gonna do there.

So I'm excited. It's gonna be fun. But yeah, so the, uh, pop record is entire week 23rd to 27th of June, and then there's gonna be the two live days, uh, in London on the 25th of June and New York on the 26th.

And you mentioned Paris. Paris is then gonna be a post summer kind of like, um, event that we're gonna do in October. Um, and, and that's just like his own standalone live day as well.

Yeah. Very cool. Alright, let's jump into what we want to talk about today.

com called, is Platform engineering just for cool Kids, right? And, and I'll give you my reasoning behind it, and then you are the expert. Yes.

Let's hear what you think. So my friend Mitchell Ashley, who's a future group analyst, recently wrote a report showing that, you know, platform engineering is gaining a lot of traction, especially for organizations where cloud native cybersecurity AI are really important and are being adopted and, you know, and, and worked on. And when, you know, from what I know about platform engineering too, right?

A lot of it is, hey, if you've been using DevOps and you're ran into scaling problems, or you're not getting the return you are hoping for, it could be that you need platform engineering really to kind of set the, the platform, hence the name, right? Yeah. To put the platform in so that you can work and go faster and more secure.

Or if you are using Kubernetes or cloud native microservices architecture, right? You want the, your platform engineers to build that platform for your teams to work on. The idea is let's get the developer out of the platform building business and let the developer work on the platform, not build the platform.

And that's great, but what about those organizations, Luca, that really, they haven't digitally transformed, they're on legacy infrastructure. Maybe they're not really much in the cloud, they don't haven't adopted DevOps, they haven't, they might be on monolithic, let alone containers, right? Type of architecture.

Does platform engineering make sense for them? I think it totally does. Um, and, and I think, um, and I think to your point, that's a great misconception.

Like, look, like, you know, it's like everything else, right? Like you have like early adopters and like the, you know, early majority, late majority laggers, whatever. Like, it's a typical thing where like, of course, the teams that are first to like AI and cloud native and all the latest trends and are gonna look up for engineering is yet another latest trend.

And like, okay, like let's check it out. Let's learn about it. What can it do for us?

And so on. Like, that's in the nature of things, right? And, and if you think about like, you know, how platform engineering came to exist, right?

We, we talked about this, that it was really like 10, 15 years ago, the kind of like leading tech companies, right? The Googles, the Airbnbs, the Spotifys, they were like, Hey, like this whole devs thing doesn't really scale, right? Like, how do I, I need to build some sort of platform layer in between devs and ops, to your point, so that devs can just do devs work and ops work.

Okay, great. Like, and that's basically how platform engineering started. And then it's been progressively trickling down to the rest of the market.

And I think for what I've seen is it's trickled down to yes, kind of like the, the sort of the leading tech organ engineer organizations like below that, right? Um, and then it's also been trickling down, especially like we've seen like a lot of adoption in the community, in the market, in, in regulated industries, right? Um, because that's where a lot of the, um, you know, effectively the way you can think about powerful engineer is not just like enabling cell service, right?

And letting developers move faster, but it's also moving faster within the paved roads that we always talk about, right? Uh, within like specific guardrails so that they can move faster without breaking things. And that's of course something that, uh, you know, insurances, financial services, like, you know, healthcare, all these people, um, government, you know, military, whatever, like, they really, really appreciate that bit, right?

Um, and so that's, that's, um, and you know, and, and, and I think in a lot of cases you could look at, you know, insurances and banks, like some of them are still running on like cobol, you know, mainframes, whatever, right? So you could, you could easily argue, well they're, they're definitely not the cool kids, right? Um, quote unquote, but, but they, um, but they're adopting platform engineering.

They're adopting platform engineering practice. And so I think in some cases what you're seeing is they're even bypassing some of the, you know, the previous cool stuff, right? So, you know, like how it's really interesting 'cause I've lived in Germany for a long time, and not to bad mouth Germany, right?

But like the, their, their, their like internet infrastructure is so terrible, right? Um, and it's just basically because they had this, um, you know, telecom and so on, like really advanced like 40, yeah. 40, 50 years ago, they were really answer it.

And then basically their whole, but the way they, they didn't, the, you know, the way they then rolled out like, um, uh, you know, high speed internet and, and it, so like, you know, if you need to get like a new router in Berlin, it takes you like three to four weeks. It's crazy. Whereas you have like less developed countries that just leave infrastructure bed that just went straight to like 4G, 5G, whatever, and then much better internet is much easier to get set up, right?

And so I think in, in a sense, you are seeing some, you know, some old uncool kids, you know, like fast tracking to some of this like best practice, um, um, without having to necessarily take the whole detour of DevOps, um, which I think is very healthy. So, you know, we have that in the US too, right? We had this legacy copper pots playing on telephone service.

Exactly. And, and even, even now, a lot of our country gets their internet via the cable provider, cable TV provider, even though they cut the cable, they're not using cable tv, they just get internet from it. And for a lot of people it's still coaxial, right?

Especially the last mile. It's coaxial. So you may get good download, but you don't get good upload because it's not as sym asymmetrical like that.

But, you know, and then you go to, you know, especially countries like in Asia, some of the young tiger countries they call it, right? They went right to cellular, they've got 4G, 5G, it does, you know, and so they, you know, it, it's been well known here. Like Korea has amazing bandwidth, right?

Yeah. The average house in Korea was getting gigabit a long time ago. Where here in the US it's still dicey to get that.

I mean, maybe if you're in New York, you are, or you know, Miami, but if you're out in the middle of America, you might still have to do satellite. That's why the, what do you call it, the Elon Musk thing is is popular out there. Yeah, yeah.

They don't have it. Yeah. But let me ask you this though.

Is platform for those legacy providers who are going down the platform engineering route, is it leapfrogging some of the things they're not doing, but still getting to the front of the line, so to speak, to the cutting edge stuff? Or is it, hey, it's okay not to be on the cutting edge. You don't have to adopt Kubernetes and containers, you don't have to adopt DevOps, but platform engineering can help you just where you are, right?

We, we could still make it easier for your team to, to, to write, develop code, deploy code, secure code, right? Manage applications, even if it's not, you know, in the cloud or, or you know, in one of these modern kind of architectures, right? Yes.

So does platform engineering pull you into the modern architecture or it will help you just where you are? No, it totally. So, so what I meant is, is it pulls you forward into, into best practice, right?

Because like we just said, it's really about, you know, platform engineering is mostly like this, you know, a cultural way of thinking about how you ship software, um, and, and how you innovate as an engineering organization. Um, you can do that on any stack, right? So you can apply platform engineer and best practices on your existing, you know, uh, VM mainframe stack, whatever, even if you're Yeah.

Mainframe, even if you don't have, no, of course, you know, probably a lot of the content that you'll see online, a lot of the content that you see, our community as well is definitely biased towards like cloud stuff and so on. But look, you know, you can think of platform engineer as something that can help you today where you're at, but then it can also get you to where you want to go eventually, right? Which, you know, and it doesn't have to be like, you know, a hundred percent cloud like we talked about before, the fact that like, you know, 10 years ago, everyone's like, cloud, everybody, you know?

And then it's like, well, hold on a second, maybe we don't wanna do everything on cloud, right? Like more, it's more of a hybrid. And I think that's actually the reality set for enterprises is a hybrid.

Even if you're maybe like, you know, 90%, you know, just like 5% cloud right now, and you wanna go to like 30% cloud over the next five to 10 years, right? But from engineering, like is a way of essentially like building an obstruction layer on top of your existing setup that then allows you to plug and play different components underneath, right? And so the underneath bit can just be your, you know, your bare metal data center, or it could be your, your cloud eventually, right?

Um, and so it, it's just in effect, I would say in, in, you know, when we're thinking about how like the old school, like engineering orgs, platform engineering is a very helpful way, uh, like one of the best use cases is migration, right? Um, because it, it actually like helps you structure the way you refactor the way you migrate software and infrastructure, uh, to, to newer setups. We bring up another kind of thing I wanted to ask you, Luca, according to Mitchell's report, you know, platform engineering is really gaining traction where you see organizations going cloud native or using AI and where, you know, modern or improved cybersecurity practices are in, in, in like, or being deployed is, is to me, is, this is a chicken and egg question.

Does platform engineering facilitate those kinds of things happening? Or do those kinds of things happening facilitate platform engineering? Yeah.

Yeah, it's a good question. I think it's, you know, I think it, it is, it is a chicken and egg. Like it's both like I, I would say, I would say certainly, um, the, the, the first thing you said, right?

Like, so, so I think like the, the more thing you add and the more things you're trying to do, the more I think you then create the need for this, like centralized, you know, pane of glass and, and, and like orchestrator and, and way of controlling, you know, all those different things that you're doing. And you know, especially like as you, I think you're gonna have like an, like an interesting correlation that we'll see in the next few years between like, you know, AI adoption and engineer adoption. It really is because you need like, the more of this, like agents, the more stuff you automate and so on, the, the more need for ization and, and paved roads and golden path you have, right?

Um, and so I think those things definitely go hand in hand. Um, but I think, you know, like we said so often at the end of the day, it's about what are the internal incentives to do that, right? Um, and so I think like you could say, well, you know, in a deal world you will, you would first build a platform and then add all these things on top of it.

The reality is like, it actually never works that way. And it's more like, okay, let's actually do all these things and then create all these problems and then figure out that actually the solution is trying to standardize 'em. So I think it's more like platform engineering kind of follows as like a way of like, okay, let's reorganize all this mass that we've created by, um, either doing, you know, you know, chasing all this new trends, which it is not just like franchising.

It's like actually you get benefits from it, right? But the problem is that now you have like two AI teams over here, three cybersecurity teams over there, and they're all working with, with developers in different ways. And then developers are kind of like stuck in between trying to figure out how, you know, how to make sense of this whole thing.

Uh, or even from an organizational growth perspective. Like one of the main use cases of software engineering is also for m and a, right? Like all this, like engineering, uh, all these companies that grow through m and a.

And then of course, you know, the engineering org is basically, you know, keeps eng mating, like, you know, all this new teams and new, uh, setups and infrastructure, and then it just becomes this like total federated mess, right? Like, okay, how do you, how do you actually make sense of that as well, right? So, so I think like platform engineering definitely is, um, you know, is is something that the more complex you get, the more it's needed.

And that is gonna create the forcing function to actually do it. Because again, it's not something that you're just like, snap your fingers and it happens. Like you actually need to put in the work.

And it's, it can be annoying because it does require people, uh, the different stakeholders of the platform to effectively do change the way to do things, right? It's not just about like, oh, you, you know, 'cause 'cause otherwise, it, it also doesn't bring the, about the benefits, right? That it promises, right?

If it's just about like, oh, you know, we talked a lot about this idea of like, okay, you just put a portal on top of existing setup. Well, that's not really doing platform engineering because you just have a different UI on top of the same infrastructure stack, and people are not changing their habits and their workflows and how to do things. Like, what it really requires is to actually like rebuild, you know, reconfigure the stack and how you do things.

Um, but then also it's like driving, you know, best practice and, and how people are interacting with that, right? And, and of course, ultimately that is change. And you could look at any organization, any enterprise as an organism, right?

You know, organisms naturally just like, uh, resist change, right? And, and, and that's, and that's the thing, the, the, the tricky bit with it. Um, uh, and so, so I think the TLDR is the, the, the more of these, you know, cybersecurity ai, the more things you're doing, the more complex, you know, the, the, you know, the more clouds you have, or even like if you're, if you're on prem and on your own stuff, right?

But the more complex that you add, the more you're gonna create a forcing function for platform engineering adoption. Agreed. You know, I'm reminded when it, you know, I'm in security 25 plus years.

We used to say in security, if you really wanna reduce all your risk in security, just unplug your router, right? You're not connected out there anymore. You just gotta worry about someone getting in on, you know, plugging a USB thing into your computer or something.

Yeah. But otherwise, unplug the router. It it, it's the same thing if you just want to like, you know, do computing in a cave or something, right?

Yeah. Well, maybe you don't need platform engineering, but as, as complexity sets in, that's when the need for a platform engineering kind of solution becomes a greater and greater necessity, right? The more complex the situation, the more complex the, the, the infrastructure, the more you want platform engineering, whether you are using Kubernetes or, or DevOps or, or whatever.

It, it's really about the complexity of, of your infrastructure, of your it. Yes. Yes.

And I mean, we talked about before, right? This idea of, of like, you know, I think Doops was this like moment in time where, um, you know, like, um, there was this explosion of, of of, of like, you know, development, right? Of like building software, shipping software.

Every, every company became an engineering organization and a, and a tech company in a way, right? Um, but still where the, the degree of complexity was not high enough that, that this, that, that DevOps paradigm could like really become so popular, right? And I think like in the last like 10, 15 years, the, the degree of complexity, right?

Because of things like cybersecurity and ai because of also the just growth, right? Like the fact that you have like no longer just like a hundred people in engineering organization, but you have 10,000 people in engineering organization, right? And, and, and, and now you need to look at this thing as like, as a factory, right?

And it's no longer just like a, like a shop or like a, like a right? And so, and so I think, I think that that, you know, in that, in through that lens platform engineer really is this, this, this, this kinda like industrialization moment, right? Um, that, that I think everybody one way at some point needs to go through.

Um, as an engineer organization, when the complexity gets there, at some point you need to build the assembly line. I love it. Hey Luca, thanks for coming on today and as usual, it's always good to see you my friend.

Good. You're in Spain today, right? You're in Southern Spain.

What a life, Luca. I, everybody wants to be Luca. Um, hey, we will, we will get together again on the show before Platform Con, so we will talk more about that for sure.

But until then, hey, if you caught this, I don't know what plat, no pun intended, I don't know what platform you watch this on, whether it was YouTube or Platform Engineering or Text Drunk TV or Apple or Spotify or whatever. But you can watch this on all of those as well as our OTT channel is out now. So you can watch it on Amazon, apple tv, uh, Roku, as well as iOS and Android.

And it's on the text Drunk tv, uh, OTT app. And we'll have platform engineering, uh, the Platform Engineering Show podcast on there as well. Luca, be well, enjoy Spain.

I'll talk to you soon. We'll see you in New York. If I hope you've enjoyed this is Alan Shimmel for Techstrong.

You've just listened to the Platform Engineering Show.