Bear in Mind #1: Platform Engineering

      At MetalBear we build open-source dev tools for backend developers, which puts our domain at the intersection of some pretty interesting topics. There’s still a lot of great content being written about things that aren’t AI - things like Kubernetes, DevEx, Open Source, Rust, and more - and we go through a lot of it as part of our daily work. How easy it would then be, we collectively thought, to provide our growing community of curious but busy backend developers with a periodic, curated list of our favorite pieces of writing on these topics?

      Incredibly easy.

      This is the first publication of Bear in Mind, our new rotating digest. The topic for this one will be platform engineering, and below you’ll find a few posts from recent weeks that we found especially poignant.

1. How platform teams lead to better, faster, stronger enterprises #

Author: Mohan Atreya, Rafay Systems

Why we liked it: We think it’s a good distillation of the concept and role of platform engineering, namely abstracting away the complexities of Kubernetes. The specific challenges listed at the end are great, and can even serve as a basic playbook for platform teams just starting out.

Favorite excerpt: “Many organizations now recognize platform teams as the quarterbacks of innovation, suited best to abstract complexity, identify the best path to efficiency, and create a much needed springboard towards cloud and Kubernetes adoption. Platform teams are uniquely equipped to optimize resource allocation because they sit in between developers and the cloud infrastructure and compute that developers need, and are able to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of software development processes.”

2. How To Measure Platform Engineering #

Author: Steve Fenton, Octopus Deploy

Why we liked it: we like acronyms. We’re fans of DORA. Most importantly though, we think think accepted metrics are a crucial step in maturation, especially of something as nebulous as platform engineering.

Favorite excerpt: “MONK metrics work because they mix concrete measures common across the platform engineering industry with contextual success metrics that align with the reasons a platform was considered a worthy investment in the first place. A strong set of metrics is crucial to the long-term investment in the platform. Without a clear understanding of its value, there’s a good chance developers will eventually be reassigned to feature development at some point in the future.”

3. Common myths about platform engineering #

Authors: Darren Evans and Steve McGhee, Google

Why we liked it: It clearly disambiguates some common misunderstandings, and helps tighten the definition of what platform engineering actually is. We especially like the part about the divergence of platform engineering from DevOps.

Favorite excerpt: “Platform engineering takes select DevOps practices and codifies them into software. So no, platform engineering isn’t simply advanced DevOps; think of it more as “shifting DevOps down” into the platform, allowing developers to follow some DevOps practices without having to be experts.”

       We hope you found these articles as insightful as we did. Platform engineering is a rapidly evolving field, and staying informed about the latest trends and best practices can be crucial for teams looking to optimize their workflows and infrastructure.

      In our next digest, we’ll be exploring some other hot topic in the cloud development world. Stay tuned, and don’t hesitate to reach out with any content you think we might be interesting to feature.

      Until then, happy coding! Or, at the very least, bearable.