Challenges of Platform Engineering

• Supporting developers, not bottlenecks. Developers don’t want a blackbox, they will grow a lack of trust in the platform if they can’t understand it.
  • Enabling self service, without sacrificing the ability to govern
• Keeping infrastructure nuances away from developers
• Keeping that infrastructure consistent (stable) and secure

Developer Portals

• Discovery - Teams need to find what exists product wise and what doesn’t. Developer portals work well for this.
• Hackability - Teams need to be able to add features to these portals.

Packaging & Deployment

• Packaging - Product teams like to code, they don’t want to be kubernetes experts to do simple tasks like deploy a simple dashboard or site.
• Abstractions - Using abstractions here works well. KubeVela is an example of a user oriented abstraction for packaging and deployment. Versus something like helm where it’s more “yaml engineer” focused, whichever flavour of yaml engineer you may be.