Eran Bibi, our Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder, will join leading platform practitioners and pioneers at the first-ever PlatformCon. His talk draws from nearly a decade of experience in DevOps and Cloud and building successful platform engineering teams at unicorns and global companies.
“Platform Engineering teams are emerging in all major companies and it’s crucial for leaders and managers to gain the right tools and metrics to build them successfully.” Eran explains. “I believe that my talk at PlatformCon will give managers the right toolkit to scale their teams.”.
The Platform Engineering community came about in 2021 with a handful of Meetup events in Berlin and Austin. Since then, it has grown into a thriving international community with over 4500 members globally in cities like San Francisco, Copenhagen, and Tel Aviv. PlatformCon is the culmination of this rapid growth. Its laser focus on platform engineering-specific topics makes this conference the first and only of its kind.
But why do we need a conference about platform engineering?
Platform engineering is the discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations in the cloud-native area. Platform engineers build an internal developer platform that covers the operational necessities of the entire lifecycle of an application.
Internal developer platforms were introduced to mitigate the antipatterns arising from organizations taking a “you build it, you run it” approach. Many companies found out the hard way that true DevOps was unrealistic. Matthew Sketon and Manuel Pais’ Team Topologies describes some of the consequences. In one scenario, the lack of a formal ops role compels senior developers to take over those responsibilities and become “shadow operations.” The organization misuses crucial resources and can no longer ship features with the same speed and reliability.
Many studies, including Puppet’s State of DevOps report and Humanitec’s DevOps Benchmarking Study, illustrate how low-performing organizations find themselves falling into these antipatterns. The reports also show that an internal developer platform can help. Use of internal developer platforms is strongly correlated with a highly evolved DevOps setup. Built correctly, internal developer platforms simplify complex and or time-consuming tasks into a reliable, easy-to-navigate golden path. As the creators of the internal platform, platform engineers pave the golden path and push their organizations to the next stage of their DevOps evolution.
PlatformCon highlights the experiences of platform engineers and pioneers. Its speaker lineup will dive into platform-specific topics like how to leverage Kubernetes and Infrastructure as Code in your organization, how to find the right level of abstraction for your developer workflows, and how engineers can get buy-in from management for their platform.
Eran’s talk will address one aspect of platform culture. “In my talk, I will share lessons learned from firsthand experience, to help you scale your platform teams, and even help you think out of the box with your potential candidates. I’ll also dive into some of the common misconceptions and confusion around platform engineering vs. SRE, how to delegate roles and responsibilities that map to the right skill set, as well as how to measure success by defining the correct KPIs for your team.” According to Eran, PlatformCon is a great opportunity for like-minded professionals to connect and share their experience and knowledge to drive progress in the entire ecosystem. “Overall, it’s exciting to be part of taking the platform engineering movement to the next level.”