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.
One can guess that the reason these professions shy away from making clear recommendations is because they don’t want to be accused of malpractice. The result is that those of us who are less litigiously inclined can have a hard time getting an expert opinion. The truth is we often do this ourselves with our consulting at Real Kinetic. A client will ask us a question and we will present them with the options and their various trade-offs. In my opinion, this isn’t even because we’re afraid of being sued. It’s more because when you don’t truly have skin in the game, it’s easy to go into “engineer mode” where you provide the analysis and decision tree without actually offering a decision. We remove ourselves from the situation because we feel it’s not really our place to be involved, nor do we want to be liable. I think this happens with other professions too.
Almost always what our clients are looking for is a concrete recommendation, the answer to “what would you do in this situation?” Sometimes we have clear, actionable recommendations. Other times we don’t have a strong opinion, but we help them make a decision by putting ourselves in their shoes. A seasoned engineer knows the answer is often “it depends”, but when they have skin in the game, they also have to make a choice at the end of the day.
This is very much the case when it comes to advising clients on operationalizing cloud platforms for their organization. When you look at a platform like AWS or GCP, it’s just a pile of Legos. No picture of what you’re building, no assembly instructions, just a collection of infinite possibilities—and millions of decisions. Some people see a pile of Legos and can start building. Others, myself included, suddenly become incapable of making decisions. This is where most of our clients find themselves. They look to the vendor, but the vendor is just like the lawyer offering all of the possible legal maneuvers one could perform. It’s not entirely helpful unless they’re willing to go out on a limb. Most will stick to generic guidance from my experience.
These cloud platforms are inherently unopinionated because they must meet customers—all customers—where they are. Just like the attorney providing all of your possible legal options, these platforms provide all of the possible building blocks you might need to construct something. How do you assemble them? Well, that’s up to you. The vendor doesn’t want to be in the business of having skin in the game.
Our team has a lot of experience putting the Legos together. Over the years, we’ve identified the common patterns, the things that work well, the things that don’t, and the pitfalls to avoid. Clients hire us to help them do the same, but they don’t usually want us to enumerate all of the possible configurations they could assemble. They want the “what would you do in this situation?” And while every company and situation is unique, the reality is most companies would be perfectly fine with a common, opinionated platform that implements best practices and provides just the right amount of flexibility. Those best practices are the opinions and recommendations we offer our clients through our consulting. This is what led us to create Konfig, an opinionated workload delivery platform built specifically around GCP and GitLab. It’s something that lets us codify those opinions into a product customers can install. No assembly required.
In previous blog posts, I’ve referenced our team’s experience at Workiva, a company that went from startup to IPO on GCP. When Workiva went public, it had just two ops people who were primarily responsible for managing a small set of VMs on AWS. This was possible because Workiva leveraged Google App Engine, which provided an integrated platform that allowed its developers to focus on product and feature development. At the time, App Engine was about as opinionated as a platform could be. It felt like a grievous constraint which ultimately precipitated moving to AWS, but in fact it was a major boon to the company. It meant Workiva’s engineers allocated almost all of their time towards things that made the company money. Moving to AWS resulted in a multi-year effort to effectively recreate what we had with App Engine, just with much more headcount to support and evolve it.
We’ve seen firsthand the power of an integrated, opinionated platform. Through our consulting, we’ve also seen companies struggle tremendously with things like DevOps, Platform Engineering, and just generally operationalizing the cloud. GCP has evolved a lot since App Engine. Both GitLab and GCP are highly flexible platforms, but they lack any opinionation because they are designed to address a broad set of customer needs. This leaves a void where customers are left having to assemble the Legos to provide their own opinionation, which is where we see customers struggle the most. This is what prompted us to build Konfig as a means to provide that missing layer of opinionation.
PaaS has become a bit of a taboo now. Instead, organizations are investing significantly in developing their own Internal Developer Platform (IDP), which is basically just a PaaS you have to care for and maintain with your headcount instead of another company’s headcount. It’s not entirely obvious if this is strategically beneficial for companies that build software. In my opinion, many of these companies are better off shifting that investment towards things that differentiate their business. Companies should not be expressing their creativity on software architecture and platform infrastructure but rather on their customer-facing products and services (sometimes this necessitates innovating with infrastructure, but this tends to be more with internet-scale companies versus ordinary businesses). What an opinionated platform does is delete this discussion altogether. Now, with Konfig, we can get the same types of benefits we saw with App Engine over 10 years ago without the same constraints. And unlike App Engine, we have a means to customize the platform when needed without losing the benefits. You can have reasonable defaults and opinions but can evolve and grow as your needs or understanding change.
There’s a reason IKEA furniture comes with detailed instructions: while some people relish the challenge of figuring things out themselves, most just want to get on with using the finished product. The same is true for cloud platforms. While the flexibility of GCP, GitLab, and similar platforms is undeniable, it can lead to decision paralysis and wasted resources spent on building infrastructure that already exists.
This is where the benefits of an opinionated platform come in. By offering a pre-configured solution built around best practices, it eliminates the need for endless customization in order to get companies up and running faster. This frees up valuable engineering resources to focus on what truly matters, differentiation and innovation.
In my next post, I want to dive into exactly what opinions Konfig has and the reasoning behind each. We’ll also look at the escape hatch available to us so that when we do hit a constraint, we can easily move it out of the way.
Konfig reduces your cloud platform engineering costs and the time to deliver new software products. Reach out to learn more about Konfig or schedule a demo.
Follow @tyler_treat
One Reply to “No assembly required: the benefits of an opinionated platform”