DevOps Speakeasy with Nick Eberts @nicholaseberts at #Devnexus 2023

this is day two and I’m here with Nick

that’s right Nick I’m so happy that

you’re here like what is your experience

here at the Texas this is actually my

second Dev Nexus

um I went once I work at Google I’m a

product manager and I went to one I

think right before covid I want to say

maybe that was 2018.

um and it was great and this is my first

time back since I didn’t make it last

year because of you know all the things

but it’s still like yeah pretty sure

yeah right but no this has been great uh

traffic’s been good at the booth lots

lots of great questions lots of good

people attending meeting some new

friends

yeah so we actually were discussing a

little bit about what should we be

talking about here uh the term the term

platform came to be a lot like you were

telling me that you helped uh your

customers be a platforms so tell me

about it like yeah how do you help them

what are the challenges yeah yeah for

sure so

um platform engineering is kind of a

loaded term right now so if you want to

do this yeah you mean by yeah yeah for

sure and

um I think that what what’s happening is

that there’s a sort of maturity that’s

being hit in the industry right now with

cloud and with Cloud native and

containers and all these terms like we

have customers that are starting to

um move past just a small business unit

that’s running and shipping its own code

on kubernetes for example and it’s an

organization of many business units

shipping code to kubernetes or shipping

code to a platform and they want to do

it the same way right

right and so like moving fast is now I

think starting to take it’s not that

moving fast is a bad idea it’s a great

idea but I think that there’s economies

of scale and

um shared learnings that you can have

when you build a collective platform

that then each business unit can take

advantage of and you can also be a lot

more efficient on your usage of

Engineers because you’re You Know You’re

Building patterns and you’re sharing

this sort of platform that improves Dev

experience right yes what you are using

proven ways is standards or yeah sharing

the knowledge

make the pot less steep correct and

suddenly because other people are using

it you’re Distributing this knowledge

right and people can help themselves

like

yeah themselves really right

self-service is the name of the game

right yes and I think that I think that

a platform allows you to do that um

like historically what it devops devops

come about it came about because

um there was this breakdown I’m a

developer I’m gonna throw my coat over

the wall right like I don’t

right and so a lot of people are kind of

fearful of the same thing that might

happen in platform engineering because

technically I have this abstraction and

I’m working to deliver a service to you

my customer developer data scientist

whatever consumer consumer

yeah

um and you might think that that would

encourage them to just throw it over the

wall because they don’t have to deal

with it anymore but I think one of the

most important things with platform

engineering is making sure you’re

serving back Telemetry observability

um signals to the developer or to the

consumer so that they can get a fast

response and know whether or not that

thing that they just pushed is working

correctly and sort of it you know keeps

them responsible and engaged with it

Beyond just throwing it over the fence

and the insights that are also coming

with observability because in the past

we have monitoring and it was like are

you still alive yay I’m still alive but

now it’s like

are you alive and thriving what is

making you try what is preventing you

from driving why did it actually happen

because first of all things doesn’t

happen in isolation it’s fair so we need

to know the environment we need to see

that in the character card and all the

kids are collaborating talking and if

there is conflict we know it as fast as

possible

yeah no that’s that’s all accurate and I

think that the true benefit here though

is that

as you’re approaching building platform

engineering you just have to make sure

that you consider your um user stories

and your user stories are not just

shipping code it’s observing it

um staying up to date with it and then

also the other I think I think one of

the other difficulties with with this

over the this concept that you’re no

longer going to have developers

responsible for building and maintaining

things aside from their code is that

they’re not going to be able to

contribute but we know that’s not true

right because we’re using we’re probably

using some Source control like git and

we’re encouraging anybody who has time

to contribute right because we’re going

to work through a closed open source

type system you can work through merge

requests and pull requests and so it’s

no longer this gate

that prevents me the developer of

service X from saying oh hey I want this

new pattern

um I’m gonna have to wait three months

for the platform to deliver it no I can

contribute and help and give back to the

platform and I think that’s super

important well

and the past because in the past we have

this build master and then release

master and and as a developer you you

kind of avoided those those Concepts

like I’m not going to touch the Palm XML

or or whatever because there was a

person that should be the old master of

that or the chief I’m not the head of

that and suddenly now it’s it’s out

there if you’re curious

and when things don’t go wrong or don’t

go as we expected we get very very

curious like what yeah

and then you were like huh yeah maybe we

could optimize this shouldn’t have put

that colon there

okay so anything that you want our

audience to know like where to go next

if they want to learn about how to like

how to partner with you to create best

class platform yeah

um well first off uh I’ll be at kubecon

and you Amsterdam so if you’re going

there feel free to come by the um the

Google booth and we have plenty of folks

out there that can talk about our

products that can help you build a

platform more easily right

um and then you can always reach out to

me on Twitter I think you have that that

access for right here you’re actually in

the

you can see like

and there um yeah and you know we have a

lot of smart folks at Google that’ll

that are willing to pitch in and help

our customers figure out how to how to

um build these platforms a little bit

easier right you don’t have to build

everything from scratch no there are

providers out there that get you some

percentage of the way and so you should

evaluate that you know as you’re looking

at how you’re going to build out your

platform if you’re going to build one

the other the last thing you don’t have

to build a platform

if if it makes sense for you if it lines

up with your requirements and your

business needs then for sure it can be

useful

but you don’t have to and you don’t have

to run kubernetes right if you have one

service

you could probably find an easier way to

run it so I just want to you know it’s

not a prescription it’s not a

prescription

but it can’t help

all right

yeah thank you so much appreciate it