category
Operations
- #112 6 min
Platform Engineering as a Service
Like most industry jargon, “DevOps” means a lot of things to a lot of different people. While many folks view it as specific to certain tooling or practices, such as CI/CD or Infrastructure as Code (IaC), I’ve always viewed it as an organizational model for how software is built and delivered. In particular, my interpretation is that DevOps is about shifting more responsibilities “left” onto developers, moving away from the more traditional “throw it over the wall” approach to IT operations. No doubt this encompasses tooling or practices like CI/CD and IaC, which are responsibilities that developers now shoulder, perhaps with the support of dev tools, productivity, or enablement teams—some companies just call this the “DevOps” team.
- #109 20 min
Understanding Konfig’s Opinionation
In my last post, I talked about the benefits of an opinionated platform. An opinionated platform allows your engineers to focus on things that matter to your business, such as shipping and improving customer-facing products and services. This is in contrast to engineers spending substantial time on non-differentiating work like platform infrastructure. Rather than infrastructure architecture, developers can focus more on the product architecture. Konfig is an opinionated platform which provides two key value drivers: 1) reducing the investment and total cost of ownership needed to have an enterprise cloud platform and 2) minimizing the time to deliver new software products.
- #108 7 min
No assembly required: the benefits of an opinionated platform
When you talk to a doctor about a medical issue they will often present you with all of the options but shy away from providing an unambiguous recommendation. When you talk to a lawyer about a legal matter they frequently do the same. While it’s important to understand your options and their trade-offs or associated risks, when you go to these specialists you are likely seeking the counsel of an experienced and knowledgeable expert in their field who can help you make an informed decision. What most people are probably looking for is the answer to “what would you, someone who knows a lot about this stuff, do if you were in this situation?” After all, many of us are probably capable of finding the options ourselves, but the difficult part is determining what the right course of action is for a particular situation.
- #107 17 min
How Konfig provides an enterprise platform with GitLab and Google Cloud
In a previous post, I explained the fundamental competing priorities that companies have when building software: security and governance, maintainability, and speed to production. These three concerns are all in constant tension with each other. For companies either migrating to the cloud or beginning a modernization effort, addressing them can be a major challenge. When you’re unfamiliar with the cloud, building systems that are both secure and maintainable is difficult because you’re not in a position to make decisions that have long-lasting and significant impact—you just don’t know what you don’t know. One small misstep can result in a major security incident. A bad decision can take years to manifest a problem. As a result, these migration and modernization efforts often stall out as analysis paralysis takes hold.
- #106 10 min
Security, Maintainability, Velocity: Choose One
There are three competing priorities that companies have as it relates to software development: security, maintainability, and velocity. I’ll elaborate on what I mean by each of these in just a bit. When I originally started thinking about this, I thought of it in the context of the “good, fast, cheap: choose two” project management triangle. But after thinking about it for more than a couple minutes, and as I related it to my own experience and observations at other companies, I realized that in practice it’s much worse. For most organizations building software, it’s more like security, maintainability, velocity: choose one.