Platform engineering excellence: Strategy and technology (DEV343)
Platform Engineering: Implementing Strategies and Technologies for Customer Success
Introduction
The speaker, Harrison, is a lead engineer at Fujitsu based in the UK, and this is his second year at re:Invent, but his first time speaking.
He works in an R&D Innovation space within the European region for Fujitsu, where they bring in exciting and new technologies to solve complex problems for themselves and their customers.
The Problem Platform Engineering Solves
When starting a new project or working with a new customer, there is often a blank canvas, and the complexity of the setup grows quickly.
This includes setting up an AWS account, organizations, security controls, data storage, and serverless technologies, leading to a complex and unmanageable setup.
This complexity reduces the cognitive load on engineers and the quality and efficiency of their teams.
What is Platform Engineering?
Platform engineering is the introduction of automation into downstream development teams to improve their cognitive load and make them more efficient.
It focuses on:
Allowing engineers to focus on the value they provide to customers rather than mundane tasks.
Accelerated development through a self-service infrastructure catalog.
Implementing patterns of "golden paths" that are cost-optimized.
Reducing delivery time, leading to faster and better engineering teams and improved customer relationships.
Components of a Good Platform
A self-service developer portal where engineers can request AWS accounts and infrastructure, with best practices baked in.
Infrastructure-as-code approach, with reusable and modular components.
Integrated monitoring and identity management.
Principles of Platform Engineering
Scalable on-demand
Secure by design
Modular and standardized
Automated
Continuously improved through collaboration
The Importance of Platform Engineering
Gartner predicts that by 2026, 80% of large organizations will use platform engineering and have internal platform teams.
The Dora report states that using DevOps correctly can increase elite performance by up to 40%.
Implementing Platform Engineering
Leveraging open-source tools like AWS Account Factory for Terraform and Hashicorp Vault for secret management.
Integrating CI/CD pipelines, identity management (Okta), and other tools to provide a complete platform solution.
Fujitsu's Implementation
Customized the AWS Account Factory for Terraform to suit their customers' needs.
Provided a developer portal for self-service provisioning of AWS accounts and infrastructure.
Integrated Hashicorp Vault for secret management, GitLab for source control and pipelines, and Okta for identity management.
Expanded capabilities to include Sagemaker model deployment and bundled application provisioning.
Challenges and Benefits
Challenges included maintaining the infrastructure catalog, securing cross-account governance, and automating monitoring integrations.
Benefits for customers included:
30 days saved in provisioning a new AWS account
Up to $50,000 in cost savings for resources and infrastructure
40% accelerated developer performance
Future Roadmap
Expanding the catalog of organization-approved infrastructure templates.
Supporting multi-cloud and hybrid environments.
Focusing on improving developer experience based on feedback.
Integrating AI-powered development tools like AWS CodeWhisperer and Amazon CodeGuru.
Continuously listening to both engineers and customers to improve the platform.
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