Recently there has been a shift in language surrounding System Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps to Platform Engineering. Granted these terms have been used in various ways for a while, but how language terms are used gives way to how markets evolve. This post provides a few key areas of thought around ways to ultimately get products to production faster. Remember…code means nothing until it’s in production.
No matter the title, anyone in the pipeline touching production code is part of the team of ensuring success of critical applications in an enterprise. This is an important concept because everyone is part of the larger team and how teams work together ultimately determines the success of any project.
The focus here will be on the actual development team who is primarily writing the code. The code in question would be delivered as microservices running on a K8S cluster. Keep in mind the use of microservices will lend itself to multiple teams individually creating a service for other teams to consume. Already there is significant dependencies and a single line of code has yet to be written.
Each team ultimately needs to consume one or more code repositories, one or more “testing” systems, at least one pipeline for continuous integration, continuous delivery/deployment (CI/CD), and many other systems to get code to production.
The Platform Engineering team is ultimately responsible for ensuring the “platforms” are working in a way to support the developers. Ensuring a great experience is paramount.
The question is how do Platform Engineers continually improve the great developer experience? The answer many teams turn to is to create powerful systems with guardrails or opinions on how they are to be utilized based on the collective understanding of the teams modus operandi or how they work most effectively.
The key to how is reducing the repetitive work, the mundane menial tasks which take a toll on the cognitive workload of developers allowing them to be able to focus on writing good, clean code.
Giving the power to the developers to consume what is needed in a self-service fashion is one major step as is giving a limited set of choices in what toolsets to use. Make it easy for developers to build and deliver software without removing the useful capabilities of the core services.
In the ideal world, limit restrictions on the how allowing choices in using GitOps or ClickOps or using a API vs CLI vs UI. Use a “as a service” approach to create a system built iteratively by the entirety of the team based on direct feedback.
What it all comes down to is the fact that everyone has different ways they want to work. Its the platform engineering team who can help ensure all of the tools are available and functional to create a great developer experience which in turn will increase productivity and get new, shiny things to market faster.
Starting a new role? Maybe this is the first foray into DevOps or Platform Engineering? What is needed to “hit the ground running” in a new role? Leaders in high positions of a company typically have a “100 day rule” to prove themselves. Let’s round it out with 3 months of progress for success.
In most enterprises on boarding new talent is typically left to the new employee. This is very unfortunate because the first 90 days of a new role will impact not only the new employee, but their immersion into the culture and their view of the company. Bottom line, in most cases it is up to the new employee to “learn the ropes” in navigating their new position.
The first 30 days
This month is usually the most important for everyone. The first thing a new employee needs to do is find a good mentor especially if they are not assigned one. Seek out those with institutional knowledge who knows how to navigate the company politics. Find someone who knows how the systems work, how to gain the access needed to be successful in the role. The mentor would have knowledge of “how things work” and what is seen as best practice for accomplishing the tasks at hand.
Some things to know:
Who’s who in the organization? – an org chart
How mature are they as a development organization?
What are the processes to put code into production?
Are the processes manual or automated?
What is the expectation of you on a day to day basis?
There is plenty more to uncover, but this will help to get started. Once the processes are understood and access is granted to perform the role, find some quick wins. Listen closely to where the frustrations may lie within your organization. Maybe the previous employee in this role didn’t automate certain tasks…submit a small PR to help.
It’s important to find some quick wins for many reasons. First it helps “break the ice”. It also shows strengths. Maybe there’s a way to improve some docs. There may be some ideas brought in from previous experience to help with a particular pain point.
The first 30 days is important to uncover the expectations of the team. Talking to stakeholders and “the customer” is important to get a big picture of what works and what doesn’t in order to find quick wins to make an impact early.
Days 30-60
The first 4 weeks are usually greeted with firehose sessions daily. Take a bit to digest everything. Review notes, brainstorm ideas, understand how the team and the company works. Armed with the broader knowledge about the organization, the team, and how things work at a high level it’s time to dig deeper into where the biggest impacts can be achieved.
In this 30 day block uncover:
The maturity of the team?
What is the approval process for delivering code to production?
What steps are needed to approve PRs?
How does code flow through the various systems?
What amount of QA is performed?
Find ways to help the team be more efficient. Listen to the complaints and see where possible improvements could be made. Again, quick wins are key at this stage. As a fresh face, a lot of times gaining access to otherwise inaccessible groups within the organization is usually fairly easy. Keep an ear to the ground to find ways to create impactful suggestions
It is important to remember as people get to know a new employee the interactions have lasting impacts. Ensure there is adequate listening and relevant questions to get underneath a complaint. Avoid making off hand suggestions, but rather find some common issues. Start to tackle the common issues and socialize improvements. The key here to to avoid “calling the baby ugly”.
Days 60-90
This is where a new employee’s impact can accelerate. At this stage having the access needed to be successful would be complete. Hopefully there’s been a few quick wins, new co-workers are impressed, and there’s been positive impact on the team.
Regular interaction with your leader would have been established. A solid understanding of what is expected is created and the mentor has made an impact. Knowing where to go to get answers if there is a roadblock and knowing how to avoid the “potholes in the road” is key.
This stage is where the “rubber hits the road”. Gaining traction in the day to day and making regular impact to the business is routine at this point. This is where all of the knowledge gained in the first 60 days can be parlayed into a winning hand.
What success looks like
The first 3 months of any new position sets the stage for every new employee. Creating a positive impression on the team helps build credibility within the broader organization and is key to instilling the confidence needed to being successful overall.
It may take far more than 90 days to feel comfortable with the role and that is okay. As long as there is a consistent method for learning and mistakes are not repeated the impact new employees make is usually sustainable for a long time. Make the best of it and keep track of the wins and losses for the inevitable review with “the boss”.
As a platform engineer, you will be tasked with ensuring that software projects run smoothly and efficiently. This includes managing all of the various components needed to develop and launch an app or system.
This may include choosing your development platform, setting up servers for hosting, finding vendors for integrations, and more. Beyond just technology, there are also time-management strategies to manage your day.
As you can imagine, being a part of this team comes with its own set of challenges and responsibilities. Being a senior member of the team takes some work — but it is totally worth it!
Being a senior developer means that you know what’s going on technologically, and you’re able to teach others that knowledge. You’ll have the opportunity to make an impact by helping other engineers get things done effectively.
It’s also important to remember that not everyone has a career in tech like you do, so don’t feel like you need to take over every task.
Plan your career
As mentioned earlier, being a successful platform engineer is more than just knowing how to work in different environments having separate and distinctly different conversations with various people about what tools you use for each environment, and how to manage your time effectively between projects and departments. It also means planning your career ahead of time.
Most experienced devs will tell you that it’s impossible to become a senior developer without first becoming a team lead or manager. This makes sense, because you need to establish relationships within the department and organization that depend on you for leadership, guidance, and resources.
And since most tech companies are moving towards agile project management systems like Scrum, you need to be able to facilitate those meetings, talk about logistics, and make sure everyone has everything they need to complete their assignments on schedule.
All of these things require someone who leads by example, sets appropriate priorities, and keeps people motivated so that they feel comfortable coming to you for help when needed. You can’t expect anyone lower up the chain-of-command to do this if they don’t see you putting in the effort into developing your leadership skills.
It’s totally normal to want to move up the ladder, but making changes to your position requires proving that you’re capable of doing so while still keeping quality control over your tasks and setting realistic deadlines.
Create a good work-life balance
Being a platform engineer means having close relationships with other people in your organization that depend on you for success, so make sure you are not overworking yourself.
It is important to enjoy what you do for a living, and staying motivated requires finding time to unwind and relax. You can’t expect to be passionate about your job if you don’t take care of yourself outside of work.
You need to recognize that it takes a lot out of you, both physically and mentally, and give yourself breaks to keep up momentum. Take frequent vacations, organize social events outside of work, and try to limit how many hours you spend working every day.
In addition to taking care of yourself, use the same energy you put into your career on your personal life to promote healthy relationships and friendships.
Having friends who treat you well will help you feel more balanced and confident in your position, and they will help you stay happier at home. Try to meet someone new once a week, if possible, to maintain strong ties with family members and colleagues.
Be a creative thinker
As a platform engineer, you will be tasked with many different projects and responsibilities. This can make it hard to know what your next job is! As such, being able to think outside of the box and brainstorm new ideas and solutions to current issues is important.
You will have to use your creativity to figure out how to best solve these problems.
A great way to hone this skill is by taking part in various tech events or masterclasses. You may even get chance to present your own project or idea!
By attending events like these, not only do they give you knowledge about the field, but also lots of opportunities to improve yourself professionally.
Stay up-to-date with technology
As a platform engineer, you will be tasked with keeping up with new technologies. This is not only important for your career, but also to satisfy users’ demands for quality services they can rely on.
As more companies implement automation via software or robotics, there are always new tools being used for this process. You will need to know what these tools are and how to use them.
You will also have to stay up-to-date with the ever-evolving practices in both development and operations. For example, when developers adopt newer agile methodologies like scrum, you must understand why that approach is better than the traditional waterfall model.
Likewise, understanding lean startup methodology means knowing why it works and if it applies to your organization. These concepts help bring down the overhead of launching an app by reducing the number of steps needed to get things going.
By staying informed about such developments, you will make sure apps launch as quickly as possible while still meeting standards.
Be a good leader
As a platform engineer, you will be in charge of many different departments within your organization. You can expect that not every department in your own company or others you work with have strong leadership qualities.
If this is something that worries you, don’t worry! It’s totally normal.
It takes time to develop leadership skills, but you are never too young or old to learn them.
You can always look to those around you for examples of how to lead and learn from their mistakes. There are several books and courses available online and through educational institutions that focus on developing leadership abilities.
There are also mentorship programs where experienced leaders share knowledge and resources with younger people. By being part of these groups, you could gain some valuable lessons yourself.
Be a good team member
As a platform engineer, your success will depend on how well you collaborate with others. You can’t have successful collaborations if one party is constantly trying to get their way or take over the process.
This isn’t helpful for anyone involved in the project, and it won’t set well with leadership either. Make every effort to work with people around you using sound reasoning and evidence, and keep discussions focused on topics that are productive and positive.
Avoid gossip unless you want to deal with a lot of resentment later, and be willing to go beyond what is practical or appropriate to help someone feel better about themselves or the situation.
As an SRE or platform engineer, you’re likely constantly looking for ways to streamline your workflow and make your day-to-day tasks more efficient. One of the best ways to do this is by utilizing popular SRE or DevOps tools. In this post, we’ll take a look at 7 of the most popular tools that are widely used in the industry today and explain their value in terms of how they can help make you more efficient in your day-to-day tasks.
Prometheus: Prometheus is a popular open-source monitoring and alerting system that is widely used for monitoring distributed systems. It allows you to collect metrics from your services and set up alerts based on those metrics. Prometheus is known for its simple data model, easy-to-use query language, and powerful alerting capabilities. With Prometheus, you can quickly and easily identify issues within your systems and be alerted to them before they become a problem.
Grafana: Grafana is a popular open-source visualization tool that can be used to create interactive dashboards and charts based on the metrics collected by Prometheus. It allows you to easily view the health of your systems, identify trends, and spot outliers. With Grafana, you can quickly and easily identify patterns and trends within your data, which can help you optimize your systems and improve their performance.
Kubernetes: Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system that allows you to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It helps you to define, deploy, and manage your application at scale, and to ensure high availability and fault tolerance. With Kubernetes, you can automate many routine tasks associated with deploying and managing your applications, which frees up more time for you to focus on other important tasks.
Ansible: Ansible is an open-source automation tool that can be used to automate the provisioning, configuration, and deployment of your infrastructure. Ansible is known for its simple, human-readable syntax and its ability to easily manage and automate complex tasks. With Ansible, you can automate the provisioning and configuration of your infrastructure, which can help you save time and reduce the risk of errors.
Terraform: Terraform is a popular open-source tool for provisioning and managing infrastructure as code. It allows you to define your infrastructure as code and to use a simple, declarative language to provision and manage resources across multiple providers. With Terraform, you can automate the process of provisioning and managing your infrastructure, which can help you save time and reduce the risk of errors.
Jenkins: Jenkins is an open-source automation server that can be used to automate the building, testing, and deployment of your software. It provides a powerful plugin system that allows you to easily integrate with other tools, such as Git, Ansible, and Kubernetes. With Jenkins, you can automate many routine tasks associated with building, testing, and deploying your software, which frees up more time for you to focus on other important tasks.
GitLab: GitLab is a web-based Git repository manager that provides source code management (SCM), continuous integration, and more. It’s a full-featured platform that covers the entire software development life cycle and allows you to manage your code, collaborate with your team, and automate your pipeline. With GitLab, you can streamline your entire software development process, from code management to deployment, which can help you save time and reduce the risk of errors.
These are just a few examples of the many popular SRE and DevOps tools that are widely used in the industry today.
