I saw platform engineering take shape as a formal discipline in 2021, and what it means is building internal infrastructure that application teams can use as self-service, so they spend less time on ops and more time shipping
A platform engineering team is all about building and operating internal tools and infrastructure that other engineering teams use to deliver software, the output being an Internal Developer Platform that product teams consume, with the platform team treating developers as customers
For instance, when building an Internal Developer Platform, the platform team needs to consider the trade-offs between using existing tools like Terraform for infrastructure provisioning, and building custom tools to integrate with their specific workflow, which can result in a 30% reduction in provisioning time, but requires 2 additional engineers to maintain
Backstage, open-sourced by Spotify in 2020, became the standard for the developer portal component of an IDP in 2021, providing a service catalogue, documentation, templates for scaffolding new services, and a plugin ecosystem for integrating CI/CD, cloud resources, and observability tools
The plugin ecosystem for Backstage grew rapidly through 2021, and the CNCF donation helped broaden its adoption, making it a key component of many Internal Developer Platforms, with over 50 plugins available, including support for Kubernetes, Jenkins, and Prometheus, which can reduce the time spent on integrating these tools by up to 50%
Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais's Team Topologies framework, published in 2019, influenced the way platform teams are structured, providing a shared vocabulary for organisational design with its Stream-aligned team, Platform team, Enabling team, and Complicated-subsystem team model, which can help reduce the communication overhead between teams by 25%
In my experience, the average time-to-production for a new service can be reduced by 40% when using an Internal Developer Platform, with some teams achieving reductions of up to 70%, by automating tasks such as resource provisioning, security audits, and deployment workflows, using tools like Ansible, Docker, and CircleCI
The 'Platform team' job description category saw significant growth in 2021 job postings, as companies started adopting the Team Topologies framework and building their own Internal Developer Platforms, with a 300% increase in job postings compared to 2020, and an average salary range of $120,000 to $200,000 per year
To measure the success of a platform team, you need to look at developer satisfaction surveys, time-to-production for a new service, the number of teams consuming each platform capability, and the reduction in support burden per team over time, with targets such as a 90% developer satisfaction rate, and a 30% reduction in support requests
A platform team fails when it builds tools for its own sake, rather than focusing on developer productivity, but when done right, the platform is successful when developers use it voluntarily because it makes their work faster and easier