| My first experience on such a team was a team that started out improving a lacking standardized deployment process (including changing the target from a very bad slow scaling prone to errors AWS product - yes beanstalk - to k8s). The biggest benefit here was that the team was on the same floor as most developers, and the entire company was really small. We knew the challenges that developers faced. We then eventually rewrote the platform from an "everything is implicit" approach (branch leads to deployment with stable URL x, logs end up at Y, metrics get scraped at Z) to "everything is explicit but we have a second component that emulates the old way unless overruled". Nothing changed for developers, except that they got a lot more levers. Then that company was merged back into the mothership (it was a "moonshot startup make an online shop for us" kind of company) and everyone there that could be enthusiastic about technology was excited about the stack, considering they were stuck in the 2000s before. The tech turned out to be flexible enough to accomodate the needs of modern Scala/Node services and legacy PHP alike (with the help of a base image that included a little go proxy to add standard HTTP metrics). Unfortunately there was a change in leadership to someone who wanted to essentially recreate a tech stack they had used elsewhere. Akamai to Cloudflare, AWS to GCP, Slack to Teams... unilaterally. The team imploded within a year and a large Kubernetes vendor came in to get developers on "standard tooling". As far as I can tell, 2 years later, our infrastructure survives though. We built it pretty tough and I guess none of the other "standard tooling" solutions really fit. The vendor even ended up asking if they could open source the system. Unfortunately nobody in legal cared enough to figure that one out. I'd have liked it to survive somewhere. It's a very unique story of a platform that actually evolved mostly organically, and I realize that most attempts at platforms don't work that way. I always try to take learnings from this into new attempts, and it has been working pretty well. Getting someone from platform to work in development teams is probably the most useful thing I'd recommend. |