What the platform should not do
Most writing about platform engineering is about what to build. Very little of it is about what to refuse, which is strange, because refusing is most of the job.
Platform Engineering¶
Moving the firewall off the application server
For a long time the firewall in front of one of our applications was CSF, running on the EC2 instance itself. It worked. Changing a rule meant connecting to the box and running a command, and that sentence is the entire reason we moved away from it.
What migrating logging from Datadog to Dynatrace actually cost us
Every platform team eventually has to take something away. The technical part is usually straightforward. What goes wrong is everything between announcing it and switching it off, and the cost almost never lands where you expect.
Golden paths that people actually take
Every platform team I have been on has built a golden path: a template, a paved road, a "blessed" way to build and ship a service. Every one of them was well used for a few months. The interesting question is never whether people start on the path. It is whether they are still on it a year later, and what made them leave.
Self-service on a slide vs self-service in practice
Every internal platform I have seen described in a slide deck was self-service. Developers would "spin up a new service in minutes" with "no tickets" and "no waiting on the platform team". I have never seen one of those slides that was accurate on the day it was presented.