Platform Engineering: Challenges and Solutions

Based on my experience leading Platform Engineering initiative at various organizations

I talked about what Platform Engineering(PE) is, when is it useful, and the challenges I have seen working with it in my previous article. In this article, we will go through solutions that have worked for my teams and me in resolving those challenges. I have led platform engineering teams at various companies of different sizes (from startup to enterprise), and these challenges and solutions are based on my experience.

Challenges

Let’s go through each of the challenges and what I have done to solve them.

#1: Avoid creating another silo

As mentioned in the previous article, one of the DevOps movement’s critical aspects is to reduce silos between various teams. Creating another team sounds like the opposite of that, and you should be careful about not creating another silo. See below some of the practices that you should consider to avoid it.

Enablers not just Doers

PE team members should be focused on enabling other teams, providing the tools to get their job done. They shouldn’t be in the business of doing everything for them. This sometimes becomes challenging as it requires a cultural change in the organization, especially if you already have silos within your organization, but I would highly recommend it.

For example, provide templates and example pipelines and let the dev teams create and manage their pipelines. This way, developers still own their application pipelines but get the tools needed to accelerate development.

Another example is that the PE team should create & maintain Common Terraform Modules that can be consumed by other teams to provision their infrastructure & also own it instead of PE teams doing the provisioning for them.

Cross-team internships

In cross-team internships, we encourage members of various teams (devs, ops, infosec, etc.) to join the PE team for a short period (maybe a few weeks or a sprint) and pair with the team members to understand how the team operates and understand the internals of a Platform. After they are done, they take the knowledge back to their team and become subject matter experts for the aspects they learned…