Laying the foundation for a career in platform engineering

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Imagine that you’re an engineer at the company Acme Corp and you’ve been tasked with some big projects: integrating and delivering software using CI/CD and automation, as well as implementing data-driven metrics and observability tools. But many of your fellow engineers are struggling because there’s too much cognitive load — think deploying and automating Kubernetes clusters, configuring CI/CD pipelines, and worrying about security. By Darren Evans and Yuriy Babenko.

Platform engineering is a practice that helps companies deliver software and services more efficiently by providing a platform for developers to use. Platform engineers are responsible for building and maintaining this platform, as well as providing support to developers.

The document deep dives into:

  • Common attributes of a platform engineer
  • The design loop and the significance of customer focus
  • What does a platform engineer actually do?
  • What platform engineers should avoid?
  • Platform engineers are the backbone of modern software delivery

If platforms are first and foremost a product, as the CNCF Platforms White Paper suggests, the focus is on its users. From the Google DORA Research 2023 we know that user focus is key: “Teams that focus on the user have 40% higher organizational performance than teams that don’t.” For example, you might decide to adopt Google’s HEART (Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, Task Success) framework. Follow the link to the full article to get access to further reading, links and whitepapers. Excellent read!

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Tags career cloud gcp teams google devops