The What and Why of Platform Engineering
Summary
No-one quite knows what "Platform Engineering" is, let alone why it is now becoming a best practice. On the one hand, you have some vendors claiming that all you need is their developer portals and 4 weeks of integration. On the other hand, you have DevOps and SREs saying they have been doing it all along, and it's just a management fad. In this talk, I will cover my learnings of "what" and "why" from co-authoring a book on Platform Engineering, helping those new to the term evaluate whether they should be doing it, and for those already practising, giving you the context to better justify your value to customers.
Speakers
Ian Nowland is currently a cofounder at a stealth mode startup, and has just finished co-authoring a book on Platform Engineering, to be published by O'Reilly. He has been in the industry for 24 years, most recently at Datadog where he led a 700 person Platform Engineering organization. Prior to that he spent 8 years in AWS where he was the lead engineer on the launch of EMR, and then the leader of the first 5 years of the EC2 Nitro project.
