Platform Strategy: Innovation Through Harmonization (Architect Elevator Book Series)

Developer platforms appear to be able to rewrite the laws of IT physics: they boost innovation by standardizing, speed up developers while assuring compliance, and reduce cognitive load without restricting choice. As you might guess, building such an in-house platform, or even deploying one, is far from easy. Too many organizations end up with a loose collection of tools or a thin veneer over public cloud services that restrict rather than enable development teams.

Harvested from a decade of building successful in-house platforms, this book reveals what makes IT platforms really work. Sticky metaphors guide you to create a platform that’s like a fruit salad instead of a fruit basket and that can float rather than submerge when the base platform evolves. It highlights that successful platform engineering requires a deep understanding of the technical business domain, which is often lacking from infrastructure teams. It supports teams in the transition from a service mindset to a product mindset and reminds them that they must avoid trying to anticipate all needs.

As part of the Architect Elevator series, the book takes IT architects, engineers, and executives alike on a journey that begins with understanding different types of platforms before progressing to success metrics and critical characteristics of in-house IT platforms. Necessary design trade-offs are elaborated based on real examples, such as serverless and cloud abstractions.

Unlike many other platform engineering books, the book isn’t limited to a specific technology like Kubernetes. Rather, it helps the reader understand the key decisions and trade-offs that a platform engineering team must make.