What is Platform Engineering?

Platform engineering is the practice of building a single platform that enables developers to navigate the product development workflow and do their best work.

The aim of product engineering efforts is to reduce friction and time to market by providing solutions for the operational necessities of the development team throughout the entire product development lifecycle.

It’s a discipline that has been gaining momentum and popularity. In our cloud native era, we’ve made tremendous progress in areas like scalability, availability and operability, but this has also made typical setups more complex. Developers are finding themselves having to master more tools and use more platforms to keep up with expectations. And so, there has been a growing movement to streamline these processes and improve developer experience. “DevOps” was and continues to be a solution for big companies with enough resources, but for smaller, more agile companies, there was a need to create unified solutions that would enable engineers to do their best work, quickly.

Platform engineering is a dynamic and creative space with a many exciting developments for companies and engineering teams. Livecycle is a great example of a company that is emerging with tools that accelerate this movement towards improving developer experience during the development workflow, reducing friction and creating a platform that all stakeholders can use to push the product development forward.

Platform Engineering Podcasts you Should Check Out

Like every emerging trend in the tech world, like-minded people are always on the lookout for good, relevant resources.

So we’ve compiled a list of some podcast recommendations you might consider if you’re looking to get better informed and involved in the world of platform engineering. There isn’t a single podcast that focused only on platform engineering just yet, but there are a lot of smart people talking about it. So hopefully you’ll find value in these episodes and from these personalities.

Managing Platform Teams: How to Build and Structure Platform Engineering?

(from the Level-up Engineering Podcast)

Link to this episode is here

This is an interview with Camille Fournier, Managing Director and Head of Platform Engineering at Two Sigma. She talks about the role of platform teams, the most important skills for platform engineers, creating smooth communication with product teams and more.

In this interview they cover:

• Definition of a platform engineering team
• Differences between product and platform engineering
• Priority differences for product and platform teams
• Communication channels between product and platform teams
• Communication challenges in platform teams
• Necessary skills for platform engineers
• The time to create a platform engineering team

Platform Engineering 101: Takeaways from Building Internal Tools at HubSpot

(from the Level-up Engineering Podcast)

Link to this episode is here

This is an interview with Zoe Sobin, Senior Engineering Manager at HubSpot. She tells her story of turning an engineering project into a centralized platform solution and how he managed communication, prioritization and every other challenge along the way.

In this interview they cover:

• Signs that you need a platform
• Getting buy-in for a platform product
• Communication in platform engineering
• Prioritization in platform engineering
• Necessary skills for platform engineers

Role of a platform engineer

(From the .tech Podcast)

Link to this episode is here

This is an interview with Ben Cordero from Snyk - an experienced SRE, with a track record of building and testing systems. In this discussion he shares some of his key highlights on building and running platform, as well as his experiences being a platform engineer.

This episode covers:

• Where to draw the line between platform and product
• The Kubernetes operator pattern
• Developer Experience
• Good on-call rotation structure

Platform Engineering in 2022 - Onramps, Self-Service, and Standardization

(Ambassador Labs Podcast)

Link to this episode is here

This episode focuses on the fact that as discussion of developer platforms reaches a fever pitch, the industry still has not converged around a single definition of "platform".

To get a variety of viewpoints, Ambassador Labs invited a small group of practitioners in the cloud-native development space to join Ambassador's Head of Developer Relations, Daniel Bryant, to discuss what developer platforms actually are, why platforms are a hot topic now and where these platforms are heading. The group was made up of Humanitec's CEO, Kaspar von Grünberg, nesto's Director of DevOps, Mathieu Frenette, and Syntasso's Chief Operating Officer, Paula Kennedy, each bringing a very different experience to the discussion.

How to Approach Platform Engineering?

(The Cloudify Tech Talk Podcast)

Link to this episode is here

This is an interview with Roi Ezra - Application Platform Group Leader at AppsFlyer. In addition to hearing about Roi's journey, they talk about how to approach platform engineering when already having an established infrastructure in place.

Screaming in the Cloud Podcast

Link to this podcast is here

This is not a specific episode referral but actually a podcast in general. Here's how they describe themselves: "Screaming in the Cloud with Corey Quinn features conversations with domain experts in the world of Cloud Computing. Topics discussed include AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle Cloud, and the "why" behind how businesses are coming to think about the Cloud."

So if you’re getting into DevOps and Platform Engineering, it’s probably worth checking out this podcast.

These are some good places to start - hope you found it valuable. But did we miss anything important? Let us know!