Platform Engineering Probably Doesn’t Mess with CaaS and IaaS
Marketing to existing customers, cloud native security, and 4 principles for platform architecture.
I’m in the middle of some kind of cold today, so I’m spending most of my time staring at the wall or sleeping.1 This means it’s a good time to catch up on my directory of PDFs and other long form pieces. Here’s some excerpts.
Also: happy Valentine’s day!
Platform Engineering Probably Doesn’t Mess with CaaS and IaaS
From the report “Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2023: Platform Engineering,” Paul Delory and Oleksandr Matvitskyy, Gartner, Oct 2022.
The authors don’t take a strong position here (?), but I think their vision of platform engineering sits above the infrastructure layer. See the diagram above, for example. The platform engineering group doesn’t mess with that stuff. This seems right to me.
Everyone loves a Gartner prediction: “By 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams as internal providers of reusable services, components and tools for application delivery.”
“Cost savings are unlikely. The platform should improve productivity, cycle time and speed to market, among other important metrics. Expect a good return on investment, but not less investment overall. Direct, cash-out-of-pocket savings are unlikely to materialize.”
This report is free to download, my work licensed it. If you’re reading this, you’ll find it useful, so you should go read it!
Securing Your Environment with Tools Before Rules
My colleague Bryan Ross talk about security in the whole cloud native world. There’s plenty go shift left, and something called “shield right.” Also, he concisely explains the value of having a container-native build service (here, the Tanzu Build Service) and how you can get developers securing their code (better) from the start with Accelerators (templates), and buildpacks.
I think buildpacks are one of the more impressive, under appreciated things from the Cloud Foundry community. The idea of, well, preventing developers from building their own containers is huge if you want control over security, governance, and even basic things like instrumentation and other production management concerns.
You may recall this Bryan from this excellent talk he gave about his experience running a platforms in large organizations. If you’re in this whole cloud thing, you should really watch it if you haven’t:
Tech Marketing Needs to Focus on Existing Customers Too
From the report “Tune Up Your Customer Content Strategy To Increase Retention,” Laura Ramos, Lisa Gately with Conrad Mills, Amy Bills, Caroline Robertson, Alesia Garrett, Pippin Evarts, Robin Whiting, Forrester, September, 2022:
In your enterprise tech marketing efforts, you should divide your attention between new customers/prospects and existing ones.
Sure, you need new customers for revenue.
But you can get more revenue and valuable subscription financial metrics from existing ones. Account expansion, that ARR, and all them pirate metrics.
And, indeed, your existing customers tend to find you, the vendor, “the most valuable,” followed by peers/word-of-mouth, and tech news and websites.
Further to the point of marketing to/for existing customers, the below shows what these existing customers like:
Platform Engineering Teams Done Right…
Netflix was one of the original organizations to figure out platform stuff, and Adrian helped on that. He lays out four principles for architecting platforms:
The platform has many layers.
The layers evolve and [eventually become commodity that you don’t need to worry too much about].
The platform is product managed, developers are the customers.
I’m not too sure: make sure your vendors are updating their software instead of letting it go stale.
Bonus principle: it’s probably good to have as few vendors involved in the stack as possible: “[e]very additional vendor adds management complexity, unexpected interactions and failure modes along with the functionality they are offering, and will evolve at their own slower pace, not the pace you would like.”
Speaking of…
We have a platform for building platforms called the Tanzu Application Platform. It has a lot of stuff in it! This is because it has big ambitions and is solving many of the problems that platform teams and developers have in large organizations. If you want to learn more about it, register for this free talk on it this week, February 16th. If you can’t attend live, just register for it and you’ll get an email for the recording.
And, if that security stuff from Bryan got your brain humming, we’ve got a three part series coming up on DevSecOps. It’ll cover the ideas Bryan covered in more detail.
My content
You were told to install kubernetes, now what? A talk with Robert Kloosterhuis of ITQ - You’ve been asked to build a cloud native cloud platform. The developers need some containers, probably some orchestration. So, what do you now? In this episode, Coté talks with ITQ’s Robert Kloosterhuis about just this topic. Drawing on Robert’s background as a virtualization admin and now, the Tanzu portfolio of stuff, they go through the type of thinking and work ITQ does with customers. Also, some tips on getting around Amsterdam for the people coming in for KubeCon EU.
Wastebook
“On the other side of this debate are people who want to play a video game about wizards.” Here.
If you’re ignorant of who the ignorant one is, it’s probably you.
Logoff
I am not good at being sick. Anyhow, it usually doesn’t last more than a day.
Actually, just for like 20 minutes.