Don’t Feed the Pigeons: Some Principles From Real World Internal Developer Platform Engineering

GOTO Copenhagen 2024

Principles are tools that provide touchstones to help you navigate a blurry reality. When you’re faced with difficult choices it’s your principles, aligned with your values, that steer your course away from or into the rocks. You can’t anticipate the seas you’re going to sail, but good principles will work regardless of how choppy the waters are. And the broad and deep waters of building a successful internal developer platform can be choppier than most, so holding your principles close is essential to not drowning in all that platform engineering promise.

Platform engineering promises the best application of people, financial and technical resources to support and deliver speed at scale, so the stakes are high and the promise mouth-watering to unsuspecting CTOs. But there’s “many a slip-twixt-cup-and-lip”, and it’s looking likely that the roads in the coming years will be likely peppered with wasted budgets and articles such as “Why platform engineering doesn’t work”. So let’s get ahead of all that negativity and talk about how it can work in a couple of real-world environments.

In this talk Russ Miles, Technical Product Owner of the Cloud and On-Premise Infrastructure Platform Products at Clear.Bank, will share some principles he uses to guide the teams responsible for delivering a successful internal developer platform. Using real-world examples and stories, and being very careful of survivor bias, we’ll explore the complex terrain that a platform initiative has to plot a course through. After this talk you’ll take away a toolbox of principles to apply to your own complex, socio-technical working environment. You’ll learn the foundations and principles that can keep your own platform engineering initiatives off the rocks and sailing in the blue waters of ROI.

How you may ask? It all starts by not feeding the pigeons. Curious? See you at the talk!