Название: Platform Engineering: A Guide for Technical, Product, and People Leaders
Автор: Camille Fournier, Ian Nowland
Издательство: O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Год: 2024
Страниц: 361
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf, epub
Размер: 10.1 MB

Until recently, infrastructure was the backbone of organizations operating software they developed in-house. But now that cloud vendors run the computers, companies can finally bring the benefits of agile custom-centricity to their own developers. Adding product management to infrastructure organizations is now all the rage.

But how's that possible when infrastructure is still the operational layer of the company?

This practical book guides engineers, managers, product managers, and leaders through the shifts that modern platform-led organizations require. You'll learn what platform engineering is—and isn't—and what benefits and value it brings to developers and teams. You'll understand what it means to approach a platform as a product and learn some of the most common technical and managerial barriers to success.

The rise of the orchestration system Kubernetes is in many ways an admission that both PaaS and IaaS have failed to meet enterprise needs. It is an attempt to simplify the IaaS ecosystem by forcing applications to be “cloud native” and thus need less infrastructure-specific glue. However, for as much as it standardizes, Kubernetes has not been a complexity win. As an intermediary layer trying to support as many different types of compute configurations as possible, it is a classic “leaky” abstraction, requiring far too much detailed configuration to support each application correctly. Yes, applications have more YAML glue and less Terraform glue, but as we’ve discussed, a goal of platform engineering is to reduce the total amount of glue.

With this book, you'll:

Cultivate a platform-as-product, developer-centric mindset
Learn what platform engineering teams are and are not
Start the process of adopting platform engineering within your organization
Discover what it takes to become a product manager for a platform team
Understand the challenges that emerge when you scale platforms
Automate processes and self-service infrastructure to speed development and improve developer experience
Build out, hire, manage, and advocate for a platform team

Who This Book Is For:
This book is focused on the technical, product, and people leaders in organizations that engineer and operate software platforms: senior engineers; architects; product, program, and engineering managers. Most of these readers understand intuitively that platforms are not just about building automation for the cloud and open source systems, but they lack both a clearer definition of what they should be doing and the practices to do it well.

We also hope to reach the broader technology leadership community: the CTOs, SVPs, and “product engineering” leadership team. These leaders have a tendency to ask questions like “Why is the platform organization so big when we also have AWS?” “Why does our platform have all this headcount but still move so slowly?” and “Why didn’t our recent adoption of [public cloud/SRE/developer experience] solve this?” The first two chapters of the book should start to answer these basic questions, and many of the techniques we spell out in the later chapters will be useful to product organizations as well (and may even provoke some introspection by these leaders!).

Finally, this book is really for anyone interested in learning how to make platform engineering work beyond the technical implementation details. Whether you are at a startup wondering when to start, a big company thinking about moving from infrastructure engineering to platform engineering, or anywhere in between, this book is for you.