Platforms…?
What is “platform engineering”? What is “platform as a product”? An “internal developer platform”? What is a “platform”? What is “PaaS”?
A platform is the integrated collection of self-service tools, services, and automation that developers use to build, deploy, run, and manage their organization’s applications. It’s everything sitting between their code and the raw infrastructure.
Rather than each team wiring together its own pipelines, security controls, and runtime environments, the platform offers a paved path to production plus the Day 2 capabilities – monitoring, patching, scaling, compliance – needed to keep applications healthy over their lifetime.
For a picture of the stack, here’s the CNCF reference architecture and the Tanzu Platform:
Running the platform as a product
A platform only pays off if developers actually use it, and developers aren’t captive customers. If using the platform is a pain, they’ll route around it, and you’ve bought yourself shadow IT instead of a platform. That’s why you run the platform as a product rather than a ticket queue: someone has to continuously figure out what developers actually need, earn their adoption, and keep the platform valuable as those needs change.
In practice, that means a platform product manager who owns a backlog of capabilities, prioritizes by organizational value rather than whoever’s shouting loudest, and says “no” more often than “yes” to head off platform sprawl.
None of this is conference-talk theory – it’s drawn from ten years of platform work with enterprises like JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab. For the full playbook, read the whitepaper. There’s also my recent talk on platforms:
Marketing your platform to developers
Product management gets the platform right. Marketing gets it used. Since developers can’t be forced onto the platform (well, they can, but see “shadow IT” above), you have to do what every product does: internal marketing, advocacy, and community management. That’s everything from roadshows and demos to t-shirts and champion programs – whatever it takes to make developers aware the platform exists, show them it’ll make their day-to-day better, and keep them talking to you about what to fix next.
I’ve written a paper on platform marketing, advocacy, and community management that goes over the full practice. There’s also a three part series based on it: part one, part two, and part three.
More on platforms and platform engineering
- Here’s how we think about platforms and AI at Tanzu, where I work. And if you want to poke at the platform itself, there’s TryTanzu.ai.
- The Upside-Down Economics of DIY PaaS – my paper on the seven pitfalls of building your own platform instead of buying one.
- Real world stories: enterprise-grade platform engineering at Charles Schwab, a talk on platforms at Mercedes-Benz and UBS, one on platforms at Sky UK, and “Improving JPMorgan Chase’s Developer Experience on the Cloud” – a look at how JPMC does platform marketing and advocacy. I also tell three Cloud Foundry platform stories here.
- Running a platform team means treating developers as your customers – a write up from my colleague Judy on what I think is the biggest, most important shift from traditional ops-think to platform-think.
- Developer Toil: The Hidden Tech Debt – how to find and measure the stuff that’s slowing your developers down, so the platform can fix it.
- Platform Engineering: What You Need to Know Now – a free ebook rounding up platform engineering thinking and practices.
- Open Source Platform Engineering: A Decade of Cloud Foundry – platform engineering is older than the name; here’s ten years of lessons.
- My platform engineering bookmarks.
And, if you’re looking for a platform that’s proven to run at enterprise scale at some of the largest organization s