A presentation at JUG Summer Camp in in La Rochelle, France by Horacio Gonzalez
From Silos to DevOps to Platform Engineering Embracing GitOps and going behind the hype Speaker : Horacio Gonzalez - @LostInBrittany 1
Horacio Gonzalez @LostInBrittany Spaniard Lost in Brittany
Adding layers of shiny complexity Last 30 years in software development
From write-compile-exec to Kubernetes
From write-compile-exec to Kubernetes
If I were a student now, I would feel scared
Platform Engineering to the rescue Empowering developers while reducing complexity
IT in the 90s Once upon a time…
In a time almost forgotten When even internet was young…
When Windows 95 was the cutting edge And a 100 Mb disk was huge…
Big companies still used mainframes Bigger, fancier, but still the same old IBM
Bare-metal based IT reigned Control, reliability, security… But cost, rigidity, logistics…
Applying the industrial model Trying to shoehorn IT into a model where it doesn’t fit
Walls & Silos And procedures, and hierarchy, and corporate politics
Why are we managing IT like factories? Because we didn’t know otherwise?
Tooling evolves CVS, Ant and (Leeeroy) Jenkins
Old school procedures
Tooling empowering changes Theory existed since 1999 But without the right tooling…
Source control tools Better than copying and renaming folders…
Dependency management & build Better than grabbing each dependency in their website and running javac by hand…
Unit testing and continuous integration Hudson CI If Testing is Doubting, let’s doubt automatically
Monitoring tools No more spending nights looking at a status screen
So many more possibilities… So much more complexity!
XP, agility and DevOps Buzzwords that changed the IT
Extreme Programming
Manifesto for Agile Software Development
Breaching walks, breaking down silos
The business of Agility The Dark Side rises
Agile Tooling
Back to industrial practices ?
DevOps: breaking Dev and Ops Silos
DevOps is a reaction to the wall of confusion Making the different stakeholders to work together in sync
DevOps anti patterns More in DevOps Topologies site
DevOps also has another Dark Side WTF is a DevOps Engineer? And a DevSecOps? A DevMlOps? A DevAiDataSecOps? A Dev*Ops?
So we have Cults of Agility and Dev*Ops And so much more complexity!
Enter the Cloud Renting server time in other’s people infra
From virtualisation to the cloud How to use the infrastructure at its full capacity
Cloud demands automation
It changes the way how IT works And it demands a mentality change
Empowering developers Infrastructure is only a click away
Distributed is the new black Cloud Native architectures and services
Sysadmins who code Creating tools: automation, monitoring, observability…
New roles appear: SRE WTF is a System Reliability Engineer?
250 cloud products only in this provider… And so much more complexity!
Declarative Infrastructure The intern metaphor
Containers make dev life easier
Less simple if you must operate them Like in a production context
And what about microservices? Are you sure you want to operate them by hand?
And what about microservices? Are you sure you want to operate them by hand?
Kubernetes: a full orchestrator
Kubernetes - Desired State Management
Infrastructure as Code
Containers? Pods? Ansible? Terraform? So much more complexity!
Becoming a developer in 2024 Do I need to know all that?
So many things to learn…
So many options …
Managing the self-service commodity
Shift left and Cognitive Load
Platform Engineering to the rescue Without adding more complexity?
What’s Platform Engineering? Platform engineering is the discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations in the cloud-native era. Platform engineers provide an integrated product most often referred to as an “Internal Developer Platform” covering the operational necessities of the entire lifecycle of an application. Lucca Galante
A fancy name for something already there Most companies already have some kind of platform Often homemade…
The purpose of Platform Engineering Empowering developers while reducing complexity
But how can we create them?
GitOps
What is GitOps? Git is the single source of truth Treat everything as code Operations through Git workflows
Benefits of GitOps
Team Topologies It’s not only a tool, but an organisation
Team Topologies https://teamtopologies.com/
Team Topologies https://teamtopologies.com/
Team Topologies https://teamtopologies.com/
Principles of Platform Engineering To make it work
Paving golden paths Platform engineering is about binding process and tools into a paved road. Rather than letting everybody operate everything and having to understand the entire toolchain to do so, platform engineers provide the glue to bind everything into a consistent self-service experience.
Clear mission and role
Platform as a Product
Focus on common problems
Glue is valuable
Don’t reinvent the wheel
An IDP over Kubernetes What could I use?
Don’t put everything into Kubernetes
Operators simplify Kubernetes integration
Lots of available operators
Hey JUG Summer Camp, operators ❤ Java
So you have a bunch of operators… Too many options again…
Use a Platform Engineering framework
Set-up a robust CI/CD/GitOps pipeline
An IDP without Kubernetes There is a life outside K8s…
What if developers only developed?
PaaS as cornerstone of a dev-centered IDP
Clever Cloud
Some Links to go further - There Is No Such Thing as a DevOps Engineer DevOps Topologies What is Platform Engineering Team Topologies Kratix Aiven Clever Cloud
In today’s fast-paced and ever-evolving technological landscape, organizations face the challenge of breaking down traditional silos and adopting collaborative practices to drive innovation and achieve operational excellence. The journey begins with embracing DevOps principles, which emphasize communication, collaboration, and automation between development and operations teams. However, DevOps deals with the relation between Devs and Ops, and stakeholders’ needs, in the form of corporate policies, governance and constraints, remain external to the process. By embracing Platform Engineering, organizations can establish a unified platform that empowers developers, operations teams, and stakeholders to work together seamlessly and accelerate the delivery of high-quality software. In this talk, we’ll embark on a journey from DevOps to GitOps and finally to Platform Engineering, elucidating each step with clear definitions, case studies, and real-world applications. We’ll dissect the elements that connect these practices and illuminate how they collaboratively enhance the software development process. As we focus to Platform Engineering, we’ll explore its ability to transcend the capabilities of DevOps and GitOps, an integrated, solution that accommodates diverse stakeholder requirements, corporate policies, and governance constraints. We’ll touch on the technical aspects of implementing a unified platform, its potential for enhancing collaboration, and the role of automation.
