These are some links that I've captured over the last week. These are things either that I want to read more about or share with the world.
Good distinction between the different disciplines in Platform Engineering. The author goes on to summaries the differences in a tweet:
Platform Engineering is not about infrastructure development.
— Ivan Pedrazas (@ipedrazas) July 31, 2021
Platform Engineering is about enabling others to do whatever they want to do.
Twitter was a magnificent platform in the early days, nothing to do with infra. https://t.co/6hKdaIxYOt
I agree with both of them. The author goes on to make his own conclusion as well:
So, if Platform Engineering is about enabling others to do whatever they want to do, at least in part, it should be concerned with infrastructure development.
My definition is pretty much the same as what is described above. The distinction is having a Platform Group, with SREs and Platform Engineers on the team. The SREs are there to make sure production works well, while Platform Engineering is about empowering developers. Together, they work on closely and meet in the middle. Platform Engineers will not typically work on infrastructure related things, but work on empowering the other engineers by way of connecting their software to the Platform. This might include maintaining the Microservice Chassis components, working on dev tools (cli, dashboarding applications, API documenting tooling), documentation, templating Helm, etc.
Another tidbit that resonated with me:
However, the solution is quite generic, while your teams are likely to deploy pretty similar microservices. So, providing them with a default project template that would be integrated with the company's metrics and logs collection subsystems would make things moving much faster.
This is essentially what a Microservice Chassis is. Which is something that I suggest the Platform Engineers own.
Great comments from HN as always.
Something that really caught my eye was:
leadership scales effort, management extracts value
The #1 piece of advice is to hold back from giving answers, and instead, challenge people with questions, to let them do the thinking.
Githubs Engineering Team Moved to Codespaces
I've been experimenting with GitPod and Code-Server for a while now as something that I can do to empower out devs.
Lots of great conversations around this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28143722
How Discord Stores Billions of Messages
Lots of great conversations around this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28292369
While old, it's a good read and brings up a couple good topics to think about when moving from one storage solution to another. Wonder if they ever started using Scylla.