Cloud Platform Team: Enabler or anti-pattern?
Recently, you can see the rise in organisations who have either a Cloud Platform Team, or a Cloud Engineering Team, sometimes also called Platform Engineering.
A platform team is responsible for creating and maintaining the underlying platform that supports the development, deployment and operations of software applications.
I thought about jotting down my thoughts on this subject after watching a video from Dave Farley on Platform Engineering, you can see the video here.
For a while now, I’ve been in a similar camp to Dave, which led me to wonder, is the adoption of a Cloud Platform team something which is an enabler for your organisation, or something which is an anti-pattern.
From what I have observed, we’re usually likely to see these in larger organisations, as well as organisations with a low level of maturity in the cloud.
My other observation with these organisations is that really, they see the cloud as just another data centre, which let’s face it, technically it is, but with some differences. Scaling is easier, deploying services is easier, the services we can deploy are more diverse.
When these teams often don’t work well, they are steeped in rules, regulations, and process, which makes them tricky to work with, and does not deliver the promise of cloud to the organisation.
When platform teams work well
On the flip side, I do see platform teams work well. When they work well, they define broad standards for the cloud platform, build the landing zones to deploy applications onto and have a solid governance structure made out of things like Azure Policy, and Cost Management to ensure the organisation stays within certain guard rails.
The difference in these scenarios, is that when the team works well, they are providing and managing the platform and letting teams deploy within the guardrails they have established.
This ends up a much smoother process with less red tape then when the Cloud Platform Team are trying to build their own fiefdom.
Well, the problem is that platform engineering doesn’t have a clear definition. In his video, Dave clearly explains that what happens with this miscommunication is that often people think the developers job is just to write code. But it’s not, software development is much more than just coding.
The whole view is very naïve in my opinion. We’re moving back to specialist teams who don’t understand the business context within which they operate — but we call them platforms now. That is the messaging that seems to have come about from platform engineering.
