Several reports have painted an overwhelmingly optimistic portrait of platform engineering. They portray it as a remedy to solve all efficiency challenges. However, the on-the-ground reality often proves far more nuanced. In this post, we will closely analyze findings from the State of Platform Engineering 2023 Report to highlight inconsistencies between the surveys’ rosy outlook and real-world complexity. 

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(Read the full version on the Klotho Blog)

As engineering leaders contemplate internal developer platforms (IDPs), many are unaware of the organizational and cultural “fine print” that comes with them.

After 15 years building platform and development teams, and interviewing countless peers about developer platforms, I decided to share a few of the stories on patterns and themes related to the unforeseen costs of IDPs. Centralizing platform functions brings about a new level of organizational dynamics that most orgs aren’t equipped to tackle from the get go. The stories I’ll share are based on interviews with leaders that faced those challenges in real time and were willing to share them with the broader community.

Few industry leaders seem to talk about these realities. The IDP hype suggests it’s a silver bullet – an inevitable evolution for infrastructure  engineering organizations. But in my experience, the transition is far more complex.

My hope is that sharing these stories will help you prepare tech orgs for the cultural and organizational costs so you can pave a smoother path to internal platform success.

“I was hired to lead”

In one of the interviews with a CTO from a leading mid-sized tech company with over 500 engineers, they shared the story that colored their platform engineering journey the most. In preparation for scale, they prioritized recruiting technical visionaries, with proven track records from past companies. However, in their eagerness to scale, they overlooked a critical factor: the need for empathy in technical design. Failing to account for and accepting the constraints and realities of the application developers proved pivotal to the platform’s success and failure.

In one interview with Alex, an engineering manager in the infrastructure-platform group at the time, he described the buzz in the platform team after they hired a visionary tech lead who had come from a hot container startup. The new lead’s big ideas and confidence about the future of cloud computing got the platform engineering team excited, and Alex admitted sharing in their enthusiasm at first.

Over the next several weeks, Alex had multiple conversations with the new tech lead, especially around the tech lead’s thoughts that the product teams should fully commit to adopting the platform team’s tools and approaches. ‘It’d be better if they fully committed to using them,’ he would focus a lot on the politics and how the product teams were stuck in the old ways of doing things and unwilling to adopt a true DevOps mentality.

Over months, tensions built up between the tech lead’s stance and product teams pushing back. The product teams highlighted both technical and cultural constraints that didn’t align well with the tech lead’s vision. The developers just didn’t work that way, and expressed that they didn’t have the mental capacity to both build their product quickly, and also re-shape how they did development.  But the tech lead insisted, convinced that their resistance was merely an unwillingness to do the work and learn something new. Eventually the CTO caved and mandated adoption, forcing the product engineering groups to use the new platform for all new services.

After one too many fiery meetings, the product org leadership got involved and made their stance clear: If the tech lead were not to budge, the product groups will not adopt the platform and will start looking at self-funding their own platform efforts. At this stage the platform tech lead was let go, and his refusal to adjust his worldview and listen to the product teams was the final straw. At that point, Alex wasn’t sure if the platform org would survive.

In a last-ditch effort, Alex and the platform team formed a 20 person software engineering strike team that embedded directly with one of the product groups. The product groups’ condition was that the platform team would join their daily rituals, co-design tools fitting their workflows, and align as mutually invested partners. But the decision came with a price. 

The platform team’s morale suffered, as those working on the existing platform felt left out from new design decisions. And those focusing on the new platform felt the rest of their teammates were not aware of or embracing the future needs of the company.

As Alex reflects now, bridging disparate worlds is messy and difficult, but the hard-won empathy and insight gained made all the difference. Trust was reestablished between the teams, setting an example within the company of how the platform team cares and empathizes with its users, going the extra mile. However, it also set a dangerous precedent. Leadership had to manage expectations and make clear to all teams that a similar embed would not be possible at that scale again.

It’s easy for platform teams to lose sight of the problems app developers face day-to-day. By immersing in the product team’s reality, Alex believes they not only built tools that empowered but learned to lead with compassion. The lessons were painful but clear – vision must align with reality, and empathy must guide innovation.

vision must align with reality, and empathy must guide innovation

Read the rest

Read the rest of the stories on the official Klotho blog and stay tuned for part 2 of this series! If you’d like to chat about platform engineering you can reach out to me on linkedin (just mention this blog post), or checkout what I work on.

(I’d like to thank Brian Bossé and David de Regt for contributing to the discussion leading to this article)

Modern backend systems have reached a level of complexity that organizations struggle to wield. Many find themselves in a constant cycle of hiring, reorganization and reprioritization in order to better align themselves with that complexity, only to find familiar problems occurring again. Perversely, this constant organizational flux further contributes to the complexity of their backend system, creating a negative feedback loop.

Simplicity won’t be found at the end of the infrastructure-platform journey, instead it reaches an incremental yet cyclical steady-state of streamlined complexity. Breaking the cycle requires a paradigm shift in how cloud development is approached, something we’ve been working on with Klotho and InfraCopilot for the past several years. Regardless of where you are in the cycle of coping with backend complexity, we can help you step outside of the loop.

How we got here

Small startups have small teams of developers balancing all the development responsibilities from coding to basic CI/CD setups. With the scaling of the company comes more services to connect and deploy, leading to extra burden that draws developers away from their product focus, making way for hiring the first dedicated cloud ‘devops’ engineer.

Once the company moves up to the Series A stage, they’re tasked to handle the complexities of operationalizing services across many repositories, usually laid out in a microservice architecture. Their efforts clear the way for the developers to turn their focus back onto the product.

Yet, as the startup’s journey continues, dedicated product teams are spun up to capture more of the opportunity the startup creates. This results in more services, which means more cloud engineering work than one engineer can handle. A shared cloud engineering team is formed, focusing on creating reusable tools and templates.

Despite their expertise, the shared team’s capacity has a cap, and supporting everyone’s needs becomes impossible, and with limited organizational tools, prioritizing across varying product groups is equally as hard. This forces product teams to come up with their own infrastructure stop gaps, moving away from the shared team’s offerings. 

When the divergence becomes large enough and the benefits of centralizing the cloud engineers becomes more evident, a reorganization is brought about to put more directional thinking and more rigorous prioritization. 

That starts the shift towards platform engineering and the beginning of the self-reinforcing cycle.

The Cycle

Step 1 – Split out Infrastructure

This is the common entry point for organizations as they scale, where cloud engineering work has grown to sufficient size that it becomes worth separating into its own entity, tasked with creating software to facilitate product teams delivery. This often is accomplished through consolidating the previous “everything goes” set of technologies onto a standardized set of choices, allowing for economies of scale in creating an ecosystem around them.

Step 2 – Grassroots Platform

However, to fully gel into a cohesive ecosystem sensitive to the company’s particular needs, there needs to be some software engineering applied. Often this is noticed first by team members within the infrastructure organization who have a software engineering background, and with good intent and initiative, take it upon themselves to start creating that software. This early work proves very valuable to product teams, and desire for the fully realized version to exist rises quickly.

Step 3 – Formal Platform

Responding to that desire, the Infrastructure team leadership takes on the scope of providing a cohesive platform for their infrastructure. There’s a vision of an easy to use self-service interface to the infrastructure that’s aligned tightly with the organization’s needs and a high-powered FAANG-like hire brought in to realize it. These types of systems take a tremendous amount of work, and the new platform team created to make it happen quickly balloons and priorities start to get strained between what the platform needs and what infrastructure needs.

Step 4 – Infrastructure-Platform Org

If everything goes well and the vision is executed successfully, someone still needs to maintain the software as its underlying technology and the company’s needs naturally shift, so the large team created to stand the new platform up is calcified into its own organization, treating the platform it’s responsible for as a product unto itself, further distancing it from the infrastructure organization that it came from. As platform teams enter a more operational and iterative refinement phase, they can suffer from many problems, ranging from bored engineers looking to reinvent the wheel to bleeding out senior talent to projects that are building something new.

All the while, the company continues to adapt and its engineering practices evolve and expertise in backend development increases. Each product group’s ambition grows, and some commonalities that brought all parties into a shared platform solution in the first place stop being quite so common. With the underlying technologies now being mostly standardized across the product groups, and its maturing tooling ecosystem, perhaps it would be better if we de-scoped and went back to just handling the infrastructure…

Conclusion

The industry is now streamlining the complexity of cloud computing, which is long overdue but insufficient. As growing utilization of cloud infrastructures increases complexity even further, it will continue to drive the need for more complex organizations to streamline the technical complexity. The desire for simplicity as we journey from startups to infrastructure-platform orgs isn’t met at the journey’s end; instead, it reaches an incremental yet cyclical steady-state of streamlined complexity that never fully succeeds in taming it.

Simplicity isn’t found in the infrastructure-platform engineering reorganization loop. To find it, we need a paradigm shift. That paradigm shift is beginning, and it’s ready for you to take part. Learn more about it by visiting Klotho and InfraCopilot.

(Cross-posted from the Klotho web site)

This blog post is a high level overview on the reasons to refactor code and systems in a startup setting. We cover risks, approaches and tradeoffs to consider in 2022.

How to judge when the cost is worth the gains

Be honest with yourself

The temptation will always be to refactor: real-world code is messy, and engineers don’t like messy code. Make sure there’s a business case for refactoring by measuring how much time the team is spending on directly customer-visible features.

Our research shows that mid-sized companies and fast-growing startups spend 39% of engineering capacity on undifferentiated work, like infrastructure. Split stories into sub-tasks like infrastructure and refactoring so you can measure where your time is going.

Well-structured is well-maintained

Clear boundaries between modules make them easier to test, deploy, and monitor. Keep an eye on customer-reported bugs, service latency, and how often you have to revert code. On the other end of the software lifecycle, there are multiple indicators that you’re trending towards a bottleneck: how much time it takes to go from design to shipped, the degree of engineering satisfaction and raising infrastructure costs — these can all be leading indicators that you’ve built up debt.

Inflection points in the businesses

Code bases tend to organize themselves on three dimensions: team size, pace of new features, and number of customers. When these numbers change significantly, it may be time to look at splitting up components.

If you’re growing the team or increasing the rate of feature development, the limiting factor will be the code’s readability. Start with targeted, opportunistic refactoring. If your customer base is growing, you may need more scalable technologies or workflows.

Control what you can, plan for the rest

Choosing right won’t prevent re-architecting

Refactoring and re-architecture doesn’t mean you made a bad choice earlier. More often, the driving forces behind re-architecture are tied to requirement changes or external factors. There are at least 4 significant dimensions that will force a re-architecture over the lifetime of a product: new feature development rate, engineering team size, the amount of time spent on undifferentiated work, and customer growth. Each of these is progressively harder to directly control.

Start with the easy dials…

f the four dimensions, the two that are easiest to control are the rate of new features and the engineering team’s size. You can control the rate of new features by being stricter about planning and prioritization. Scaling the team is a slower process, but it’s usually one you can at least plan for.

If both the team and the rate of new features is small, refactoring is unlikely to have a significant impact on the business. At the other end of the spectrum, a large team working on many features may benefit from reorganizing into smaller teams — and you should consider refactoring or re-architecting the code to match. An architecture that enables cleaner organizational and code boundaries will allow the product and company to scale.

…and then move onto the harder ones

The amount of time your team spends on undifferentiated work can be hard to rein in, and customer growth is the hardest measure of all to affect. If these were easy, everyone would minimize undifferentiated work and maximize customer growth! Still, you can

get ahead of problems with a careful and proactive approach to refactoring.

The first step is knowing when not to refactor. If your customer growth and amount of time spent on undifferentiated work is low, don’t spend time on refactoring: focus instead on impactful, customer-visible features. Similarly, if you have good customer growth and low amount of undifferentiated work, your team is doing well. Consider tactical refactoring to avoid the amount of undifferentiated work from growing, but don’t spend too much time on it.

If your team is spending too much time on undifferentiated work, it’s time to revisit the architecture to one that scales better to where your company is today.

If your customer adoption is lower, your priority should be a cheaper architecture that will give you more runway.
If both your customer adoption and the amount of time your team spends on undifferentiated work are high, it may be time to focus on a centralized, optimized solution. This typically takes the form of a dedicated operations team that can efficiently execute on infrastructure tasks. This is a great problem to have — so take a moment to congratulate yourself and your team for getting here!

Have a target, then find shortcuts to get there

Have a plan, even if it’s not perfect

Once you’ve committed to a re-architecture, don’t be afraid to think big. Lean on your engineers to come up with an end-state they’d love, and then pare it down as needed. Chances are, the opportunity for a major re-architecture will only come once or twice in a product’s lifecycle, so be prepared to live with any compromise you make. But by the same token, know that even the best laid plans will go awry as you start implementing. 

Make big plans, take little steps

Once you know where you want the code to be, be tactical about how to get it there. Work one one component at a time, or pick components that are as far away as possible from each other. If you haven’t already invested in solid testing, both at the unit and system level, now’s the time. Tests will give you confidence that your changes won’t break existing customer experiences, but they can also help your team come up with its definition of done. When the tests pass, the component is ready!

The best technology is the one you can adapt

The key to reducing the impact of refactoring and re-architecting on startups in particular is to use technology that is adaptable. 

Historically, companies choose specific technologies like VMs, serverless, or containers to host their applications. The problem is that switching from one technology to another is prohibitively expensive, and what you need today may not be what you need tomorrow.

An adaptive architecture is one that lets you host your application on any technology equally easily. This lets you adjust the hosting environment on the fly, to match your current needs.  Specific technology choices like AWS Lambda, Fargate, Kubernetes, gRPC, Linkerd, Azure/GCP become interchangeable.

By reusing existing programming language constructs like functions and event handlers, as well as interfaces that are idiomatic to each language, adaptive architectures make cloud services easier to use.

Look for abstractions and tools that are lightweight, but flexible enough to let you switch technologies. We think Klotho annotations fit the bill, since they let you separate your architecture’s semantic meaning from the deployment configuration — but  with enough investment in runtime libraries and infrastructure automation, you can build out a similar solution yourself.