Behind the scenes of building Platform Engineering

Can you still call them the FAANG companies considering Facebook is now Meta and Google is now Alphabet? Maybe it’s MAANA now?! Elliott Clark (CEO/Founder, Batteries Included) talks about creating a Platform Engineering org and building an IDP before it was cool.

SHOW: 773

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SHOW NOTES:

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Elliott, you have some great experiences at Cloudera and Meta/Facebook that shaped you moving out to start your own thing at Batteries Included. Give everyone a brief background please.

Topic 2 - You were building Internal Developer Platforms (IDP) and doing Platform Engineering before it was cool. Tell everyone a little about the need and how it came to be at Meta/Facebook.

Topic 3 - I think it’s probably important to talk about the origin stories for this. What was the problem to solve? How was it solved? What was the final “product” and how was it used?

Topic 3a - Anything you would have done differently?

Topic 4 - We always hear stories about the FAANG companies and the scale they operate in. But, we hear mixed things about if following those practices are a good idea. Some say we should use them because we know it is repeatable at scale. Others say the practices are only relevant at those companies and most organizations don’t need that level of complexity. Thoughts? What are the pros and cons?

Topic 5 - What are your thoughts on the current and future state of Platform Engineering and Internal Developer Platforms? There seems to be a tension between being prescriptive or opinionated enough for operations to scale vs. developers needing to use the tools they know and love to be as productive as possible. Thoughts?

Topic 6 - Let’s talk about Open Source. Many have heard about Backstage when it comes to Platform Engineering and we’ve even talked about it on this show before. What are your thoughts around building these platforms on OSS. Also, any thoughts on OSS being cost prohibitive?

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