Platform Strategy: Innovation Through Harmonization (Architect Elevator Book Series)

Developer platforms appear to be able to rewrite the laws of IT physics: they boost innovation by standardizing, speed up developers while assuring compliance, and reduce cognitive load without restricting choice. As you might guess, building such an in-house platform, or even deploying one, is far from easy. Too many organizations end up with a loose collection of tools or a thin veneer over public cloud services that restrict rather than enable development teams.Harvested from a decade of building successful in-house platforms, this book reveals what makes IT platforms really work. Sticky metaphors guide you to create a platform that’s like a fruit salad instead of a fruit basket and that can float rather than submerge when the base platform evolves. It highlights that successful platform engineering requires a deep understanding of the technical business domain, which is often lacking from infrastructure teams. It supports teams in the transition from a service mindset to a product mindset and reminds them that they must avoid trying to anticipate all needs.As part of the Architect Elevator series, the book takes IT architects, engineers, and executives alike on a journey that begins with understanding different types of platforms before progressing to success metrics and critical characteristics of in-house IT platforms. Necessary design trade-offs are elaborated based on real examples, such as serverless and cloud abstractions.Unlike many other platform engineering books, the book isn’t limited to a specific technology like Kubernetes. Rather, it helps the reader understand the key decisions and trade-offs that a platform engineering team must make. Read more