#57: If Platform Engineering is such a big deal. Why haven’t you started yet?

Hey there! This is Platform Weekly, your weekly journey to the center of the platform engineering earth??

If Platform Engineering is such a big deal. Why haven’t you started yet?

You don’t need me to tell you that platform engineering is a huge deal. It’s been on Gartner’s hype cycle and top 10 trends to watch in back to back years. It’s all anyone at KubeCon was talking about a few weeks ago and I bet you the same will be true at re:invent next week. And just look at the growth of this newsletter or the Platform Engineering Slack community. Platform engineering is everywhere at this point.

By now I have seen some of the largest companies in the world, with thousands of developers in their engineering orgs, use a Platform Orchestrator to build Internal Developer Platforms that dramatically improve their velocity and time to market.

So why haven’t most teams started on their platform engineering journey yet? Why, when I speak to so many people about it, they tell me “we are 100% going to build a platform. Just not yet”?

The answer might not surprise you. All this incredible hype has meant that people think platform engineering HAS to be huge and complicated. That it HAS to be a gigantic digital transformation including thousands of devs, and months of back and forth with security, compliance, CCOE, multi C-level stakeholders etc etc etc.

And I totally understand why anyone in their right mind doesn’t want to make that kind of gigantic multi-year commitment at the moment. Especially in these market conditions.

The thing is though, it doesn’t have to be that at all. And it shouldn’t. You can get started platforming right now with a single team. Those engineers can use a platform orchestrator to start deploying apps within a matter of weeks, and start piecing together exactly what the Internal Developer platform would look like.

When it works for them (which it usually does), it can then be expanded as time and resources allow. You don’t need to get trapped waiting months for compliance to approve a multi-year digital transformation. You could be deploying apps with your platform orchestrator and Internal Developer Platform in a matter of weeks. That will work out the kinks, understand what works and what doesn’t, and gain valuable knowledge that will make expanding out a breeze.

Find the right team and get them started right away and you’ll have a working platform in 60 days, not 600.