Why and Where to start a Platform Engineering Team

By Matheus Paes Pereira

Elevator Pitch

Internal Platform probably is the most used buzzword that you heard recently, is not a new concept but why has this become attractive a huge interest for hyper-growth companies? I’ll share how to struct platform teams to improve the developers experience and the lessons I’ve had learned.

Description

Imagine how to support around 800 developers in a fintech that is on growing fast in the South America market, the ecosystem is polyglot (Java, GoLang, Python, PHP) which gives an additional complexity on how to avoid lack of knowledge between the infrastructure, coding best practices, and business needs. This is what led us to decide to build an Internal Platform as a Product, this is an approach to face the challenge of complex environments, the main goal is to improve de the developers’ productivity and also keep the cognitive effort low as possible. This presentation will show a possible way to start establishing platform teams and the benefits to do that for the organizations.

Notes

I’m leading a project focused on establishing a CI/CD pipeline that will support around 800 developers, with a polyglot ecosystem, here we have microservices developed in Java, GoLang, Python, PHP in multiple frameworks as well. To achieve this goal, we are using in our stack Tekton, Helm Charts, and Harness. Our environment is 100% cloud-native we are delivering our services on EKS clusters.

On top of all that, also we decided to use Backstage as our Internal Develop Platform which gives our developers one single frontend to have an overview of all components (microservices, observability metrics, Accelerate metrics, K8S cluster status, etc) regardless of where they are running or who is taking care of it.

I’m very excited to share this content with the community and I think it will be inspirational for the community.