The tech industry went from IT to DevOps, and Platform Engineering showed it well to enable effective software products development. Serg with his teams re-architected and delivered a few Web Cloud Platforms, and applied engineering reorganizations, to improve companies’ products delivery. It was done at scale- a few hundred engineers and operations, dozens of products, hundreds of microservices and customers. This talk aims to share the experience and learned practices, including practical technical tooling suggestions, processes, and team organization tips. And, of course, live and coding demos.

2. DevOps and Web contributor:
contributed to Terraform, ECMAScript/JS and Chrome
My path Platforms Creator
Title Managed team size
Tech Lead, Architect ~10
Engineering Manager ~20
Director of Engineering 50+
SDirE, Global Head of Eng. 100+

3. What problem do we try to solve
and Why Platform Engineering?

4. 🏦Business problem
- Finance (CFO): Cost effective software development
cycle!
- Product (CPO): We want to decrease time to market
- Security (CIO): We want to be able to introduce and
change security checks and deliver fast security fixes
and updates across the products
- CPeopleO, leaders: Provide more common tech stack
to simplify the hiring, and more up-to-date to improve
eNPS
- Architects: We want to enforce a common
architecture (golden path)
- Engineering: We want to quickly create apps and be
able to run them, but concentrate on features
- Operations: We want to run apps as blackboxes, and
not care what is inside
- COO: We want to acquire a company, are we able to
integrate acquired company tech?
- Board: You have 1 year to do all this, otherwise we
sell the company 😳
Organization Problem
💰Finance (CFO) Cost
Product (CPO) ⏰Time to market
🔐Security (CIO) - security checks
- fast security fixes
Leaders, CPeopleO - more common and
modern tech stack
COO 📊Be ready for M&A
Board, CEO Fast results and future
projection
🏛Architects Common architecture
Eng. and Operations Less cognitive load

5. Problems we encountered
COMPLEXITY GREW EXPONENTIALLY 👉
Cognitive load
and complexity
👈Each team used different tooling,
providers...

6. DevOps is a good start, but...
Problem: How do we apply DevOps?

7. Organization structure
Problem: How do we apply Team
Topologies?

8. So why we
adopted
Platform
Engineering?
1. Way to apply DevOps principles in
practice in large orgs.
2. Helps to enable Team Topologies

9. How to create Platform Engineering org?
(details and demo)

10. 1. Tooling Demo: Engineering Portal
First step- simple static docs:
-
Next step:
For scale:
-
- Docusaurus- create simple versioned doc sites
Slate- simple static docs for API
- Backstage- open-source Internal Development Portal
Roadie- paid Backstage SaaS

11. Platform stage at this point:
Childhood
Typical team structure
Development
Platform
overview

12. 2. Tooling Demo: Front-End
- Frontend workshop for UI development (React, Vue, Angular, JS)
- - Provide own app templates
- - own app configs
- Storybook
Create React apps self-service
Customize app config

13. 3. Tooling Demo: Configurable Microservices/Apps self-service
Create a microservice [optionally, with microfrontend]
- (CLI)
- (Web-based)
Other:
- in Jhipster
- in Backstage
-
-
https://www.jhipster.tech/creating-an-app/
https://start.jhipster.tech/generate-application
Provide own application templates
Create own app templates
Integrate you CI/CD
Define DB, Testing tooling, Monitoring etc.

14. Platform stage at this point:
Adolescence
Typical team structure
Development
Platform
overview

15. A curated list of tools
and resources for
Platform Engineering.
https://github.com/shospodarets/
awesome-platform-engineering

16. 4. Tooling: Upgradability
Use for automated rollout of new features and versions across Platform customers
Front-End: /
Microservices, apps and infra:
Dependencies:
-
Codeshift Codemods
JHipster Upgrading application
Renovate- multi-platform and multi-language.

17. Platform stage at this point:
Maturity
Typical team structure
Development
Platform
overview

19. What was achieved
- 50+ platform-based applications delivered to customers
- 100+ platform-based microservices
- 20+ platform-based microfrontends
- time for app MVP to production decrease 2.3 times (p95)
- MTTR decreased from 9 to 4 hours
- Availability improved from 95% to 99.999% (up to ~5
min/year down)
- eNPS score improved for +12

20. Tips from experience
- Pilot team(s) is super important to become evangelists
- Treat Platform as a product:
1. Internal teams are your customers: provide support, Slack
etc. channels
2. Invest in Platform PM and DevX culture
3. Evangelise- regular releases, demos, newsletters
- For UI adoption put heads together with the UX, infra-
DevOps, security- SecOps
- Cooperate with Architects/Directors/VP/CTO across the org
- Jackpot Platform strategy- find a way and deliver your
platform to your company customers
Inspirational 🗣
- Prefer golden path over golden cage
- Target the right level of abstraction
- Establish the proper "X-as-Service" or
similar definitions for each team
- Foster the Pull vs Push culture
- Work with leadership for a top-down
support for bottom-up enablement

21. Outcomes for
🏦business problems
Problem Outcome
⏰Time to market Allowed to switch from 3 months product releases to weekly.
Lead time went from 9 days to 6 hours
🔐security checks
- fast security fixes
Common Platform security guardrails (shared CI/CD)
Supply chain fixes delivered in ~3 hours to prod across portfolio
- better tech stack Common and latest tech. stack used across 82 percentile of projects
Be ready for M&A An acquired company fully migrated their stack in 4 months
Future projection Marketing and Sales provided full support as only customers got
access to Platform
Less cognitive load Time to onboarding decreased 2.3 times
💰Cost Onboarding, common features rollout, Upgradability cost save

22. THANK YOU!
Platform Engineering tooling:
⭐
https://github.com/shospodarets/awesome-
platform-engineering
https://www.linkedin.com/in/shospodarets
Serg Hospodarets