Architecture Considerations for platform engineering teams | Hacker News Reader

Architecture Considerations for platform engineering teams

thenewstack.io

16 pointsmsolujic9 comments

Platform teams... Yet another fad. Most companies do not need a platform team and will not benefit from one. There are hundreds of tech companies dedicated to building and selling platforms. If you decide not to pay for one of those, you better have a bulletproof rationale why you think you should build your own platform startup within your company, or you'll end up throwing away cash and delaying the benefits you could've had earlier, if you ever even finish building your platform.

If you're not actually building a platform, but instead are just borrowing the name for your Ops team so you can get more funding from your dumb bosses, more power to ya.

Sometimes a team rebrand gives you an easy way to reintroduce the benefits a team brings to the larger org, especially if its an ops team that interacts with a lot of other teams.

Platform teams sounds better than plain deformed teams with no clear business goals. No?

They are a great idea for mature tech companies. It is how they optimize building internal services, and abstract existing ad hoc tools. When off-the-shelf solutions do not exist, do not meet needs, or are not cost effective... who ya gonna call? The Platform!

At this point I would question anyone who thinks there isn't an off the shelf platform type product for even large scale enterprise concerns. Almost every service provider out there has an enterprise offering.

"Mature" tech companies often aren't in my experience. Most of them fail to implement the most basic IT standards, unless some law or contract forces them to go through the motions.

PE is just another term for "sysadmin", just coming from a different culture (eg. Facebook rather than Google, where you'd be named SRE).

Do you think company A should pay company B for _all_ of their 'platform' needs or do you mean they should buy different things from different companies like Kafka and a developer portal?

I hate this new name of "Platform team", newcomer state that they existed for long under "System team" and mid-follower of the tech. world will state that it is the vision from "Team Topologies" book (from Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais).. Still this post doesn't even take part of any.. Again, another miss fired direction in my 2cents.

For data platforms, it's all about whitelabeling an existing data platform, without even hiding the original label.

"Our data platform is a best in breed Data Warehouse + ETL + BI tool that all are glued together with the built in integrations and a tiny bit of custom work"

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