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The "platform zero" paradox

The Challenge

The so-called Cloud Native practices such as Infrastructure-as-Code, GitOps, Container orchestration, etc, are a big challenge to adopt at an organization-wide level (e.g. more than one already convinced team).

The Solution

Platform Engineering is a reasonable approach to building and spreading cutting-edge infrastructure and system technologies for any organization.

The Paradox

If you decide to adopt Platform Engineering, then how is your Platform Team supposed to start?

2 options come to mind at this stage:

  • The Platform Team does not work in a Platform Engineering way, and you missed the point of global adoption and leadership. The team will not be able to build and share best practices as they do not practice themselves.

  • The Platform Team has to build its own Platform first, which is is greatly time-consuming. Also this can lead to a failure on the first step, as they are both client and developers they can miss the target and build their own maintenance hell that will slow them down for the next steps.

A proposal

Another way to solve this issue would be to adopt a first platform paradigm that:

  • is autonomous on IS corner stones (IdP, PKI, ...).
  • is sized to meet the core needs of a single pizza team of Platform Engineers.
  • fights for resource frugality.
  • has high standards on community-shared compliance level (CIS, MITRE, ...).
  • is only based on OSS components to avoid vendor lock-in.

That would put your Platform Team back in a position of service consumer and allow them to start building value for the other teams of your organization on day one of the journey.

That first platform could not fit into you enterprise internal compliance standards, but the community-shared standards combined with a least perimeter exception could be acceptable.

The Platform Team works in a Platform Engineering way and they can share their practices with the internal community as well as with the adopted platform community.

The rope-leader of the Platform Engineering journey for your own organization is externalized on a community effort.

If that first platform only please you at 75%, then clone it and hack it your way.