2 years ago

Hybrid- and multicloud can break the common-sense ergonomics and economics driving the rise of platform engineering. This is a job concerned with designing, building, maintaining and extending a self-service, automation and abstraction framework that makes platform components (e.g., Kubernetes, databases, services provided by underlying cloud frameworks, etc).

In fact, DIY approaches reinforce a misunderstanding about the role of platform engineering — that it’s really just infrastructure engineering for K8s.

For platform engineers, this layer of interlinked cluster and infrastructure automation is, or should be, a kind of textbook for how to do platform engineering across infrastructures. They use this to provide a simple, cloud-native experience — one WebUI, one API — that lets you deploy, scale, observe and lifecycle-manage Kubernetes across all clusters and infrastructures — To speak simply: This is the part of platform engineering that for your organization delivers the least value, requires the most time and expertise, and incurs the greatest risk.