Accelerating time to market is paramount in today's fast-paced landscape, and developing an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) centered around self-service tooling is key to achieving this objective.
Our cloud strategy encourages centralizing to a single cloud provider, which posed a few challenges as teams previously had the autonomy to choose their own paths and tools. As a result, our platform needed to be architectured in such a way to be agnostic to underlying cloud-specific services and designed to provide paved paths.
This talk will provide valuable insights into the nuances of platform engineering in the cloud, offering attendees a blueprint for implementing similar strategies in their organizations. We’ll discuss the challenges faced while building a multi-tenant platform in the cloud, including specifics in how we designed:
- A simple onboarding experience, complete with starter software templates
- A secure and isolated environment on top of our centralized Kubernetes clusters
- A simple onboarding experience for multiple cloud accounts for each tenant
- A centralized approach to CI/CD, including standard build and test pipelines
Interview:
What key takeaways can attendees expect from your InfoQ Dev Summit session?
- Creating a centralized cloud strategy with a unified cloud provider.
- Designing a multi-tenant platform with simple onboarding, secure environments, and standardized CI/CD pipelines.
- Emphasizing the importance of self-service tooling to enhance developer productivity and accelerate time to market.
What's the focus of your work these days?
I'm currently focused on improving Developer Productivity in the Platform Engineering space. Two insights I've gained while working in this space over the last few years are the importance of metrics (e.g. customer satisfaction over time, engagement with features, etc) and making your platform as self-service as possible.
What technical aspects of your role are most important?
I value being a generalist who has expertise in certain areas, but can jump in and learn when necessary. The platform space is very broad and changing rapidly, so it helps to be nimble!
How does your InfoQ Dev Summit Boston session address current challenges or trends in the industry?
Many companies are seeing whether a dedicated Platform Engineering team makes sense and in how an Internal Developer Platform fits in their technical strategy. I'll discuss the tradeoffs we made through our journey, some of the challenges we've overcome, and tradeoffs we've had to make.
How do you see the concepts discussed in your InfoQ Dev Summit Boston session shaping the future of the industry?
Platform Engineering is a new concept and field within our industry that many companies are interested in exploring. Hopefully my session will shed light on how an end user of many open source and vendor tools is working in this space.
Speaker
David Grizzanti
Principal Engineer @nytimes
David Grizzanti is a Principal Engineer at The New York Times focused on improving developer productivity by enabling engineering teams to more effectively and efficiently build, test, integrate and deploy software. Previously he was a Distinguished Engineer at Comcast, where he oversaw the development of multi-tenant software platforms that support tens of millions of customers across North America. His areas of interests include improving infrastructure automation, open source communities, and engineering leadership.
Video is not available