Platform Engineering vs. Devops with Joep Piscaer - VMware Explore 2022 EU
Transcript
[Music] thank you hey how's it going it's Keith Townsend you're watching coverage of VMware Explorer 2022 here in beautiful Barcelona Spain every time I say Barcelona I want to make some type of of Jackson he scores this is football capital is Europe in general but Barcelona did just hear about the teams here more than any place else I have the pleasure of interviewing uh this is going to be an interesting conversation Joe because you've hosted the CTO advisor Studio before at vmworld actually a few years
ago uh we've both done the Cube together so it's not a really an interview more than a conversation Joe pisker uh founder of your own independent CTO advisor and analyst firm you wanted to talk to me about platform engineering today yeah no correct I mean platform engineering is a topic that I think is just super interesting um you know I I host devops days I'm one of those organizers back in the Netherlands I was one of Amsterdam 1097 and lately we've been having a discussion with
that whole group you know is devops still relevant because we keep hearing about you know platform engineering right and so platform engineering is a topic that I think deserves attention especially at a show like this you know this is still for me vmworld this is still about you know industry conference and so the ways we work the teams we engage in it they matter to me and so the discussion around what is platform engineering is it relevant what do we do with it how do we
see it in the show here this week those are all just interesting topics to me so I went to my first devops days in Chicago a few weeks ago uh fascinating uh uh group I think it does need to be addressed like what what version of devops are we talking about because there's like different layers yeah of devops when we say devops what are we talking about for this I mean there are so many different interpretations of it right there's a very narrow technology-minded one you
know we're talking about CI CD and tooling and stuff like that that is not necessarily devops to me devops to me is we have this two groups and they have to work together devops is all about collaboration it's all about reducing handovers between two teams is all about fostering communication between the teams so that we can actually deliver something as I see together to produce value to you know get something to the customer uh whether that be an external customer or the internal customer so devops
to me and that's also what devops days is all about is about collaboration it's about figuring out together how to do this whole I.T thing and I think one of the things that uh when people use the term devops they think specifically of developers and operations and and at random prize we know those terms are not as rigid a little bit used you know you have app owners you have infrastructure and it's kind of that idea of those groups coming together to collaborate so we can't
you can't buy yourself a devops oh no you have to it is a culture change and it's about how you operate well you cannot buy it but I can sure as hell try and sell it to you I can I can sell I can get two different things you can't buy it but I can't I can't try and sell it we are we're the conference that there's probably a half a dozen vendors on the floor that will sell they'll try and sell you a devops oh
yeah yeah all right so platform engineer yeah I mean platform engineering kind of is I don't know the next iteration of trying to solve this problem right so one of the things that always kind of irked me with the term devops is there's no infrastructure in that work it's not you know dead of infra Ops or whatever some kind of version of that and so we we kind of forgot about infrastructure and rightly so because Cloud took away most of that pain um but now we're
dealing with you know basically three things and then it became four things because security suddenly became a thing and so it's kind of very ambiguous what it is and that's interesting um in in terms of platform engineering because it isn't as rigid rigidly attached to developers and operations it is all of those things it's also about resilience it's also about security it's also about you know making sure your developers or any other group that uses it within your company can work quickly successfully you know efficiently
and all those other terms describing how to work it's a platform engineering to me it's kind of the next iteration or maybe even a super set of what devops was supposed to be because we're kind of going back to the drawing board saying hey we want to develop we need to build something we need to create something we also need to run that we also need to operate that it also needs to be available secure resilient Etc it's a platform engineering kind of embodies the next
in a way we think about how to do all of these things where we build something internally a platform and I don't care if that's an internal developer platform or an is platform or a platform as a service you know past platform it's about the idea that we need to standardize the stuff that we need to do our daily job you know me I use this laptop I don't go and build my own email service I buy it from Google and platform engineering kind of has
that same embodiment where we treat all of the things that we need to have to do our job as a platform as a service so we build something we put in all the stuff that we need and now our developers are internal I.T teams can use those things independently from operations independently from infrastructure to deliver whatever it is they need to deliver maybe that's an application I could easily conflate that we're again we're at VMware Explorer so I can say hey tap tansu application platform then
I just buy my way into having a platform team well I mean you'll buy a product right but like we jokingly said I can try and sell you some devops um and I'm not you know trying to say that chap is has no value but it's it's only that it's just a product it is cool and it is just a piece of that larger puzzle because you need to successfully adopt the product within your company but then also you need to successfully have other teams adopt
your platform and that is not something a product can do for you so I was a on LinkedIn somebody uh they tagged me in this video that Walmart put out yeah that talked about their trip uh triplet process I'm not sure what that is I got to look that up yeah uh uh it's on my to-do list but more importantly Walmart talked about their Cloud their internal Cloud that allows them to do multi-cloud from the different Cloud providers and their private infrastructure and one of the
things that really struck me was that that cloud is built on openstack and there's this premise I don't know if it's a premise or perception yeah right or wrong that you need kubernetes to build a platform team and I think what Walmart is showing is that it's not they absolutely have a platform team but what they're showing is that the job of the platform team isn't to implement a specific technology correct but to your point to be that clearing house for making developers application owners and
even infrastructure folks jobs I don't know if it's necessarily easier but achievable achievable and repeatable and consistent so one of the things I used to work at a supermarket and we had this challenge where we had I don't know 50 different development teams using 50 different technology stacks and then security came around and said hey um we need you to be compliant to this standard and I had to go to each of those teams and figure out how compliant were they what things did they need
to improve and so by having a platform you kind of front load that work in into the platform and you say this is our standard these are the security practices that we preach and that we adhere to or these are I don't know the templates or the ways the standardized ways of working like this is our pipeline and you have templates you have that Scaffolding in place so that teams don't necessarily need to think about all that stuff that they don't care about like security like
setting up observability like setting up data protection all that stuff so it's nice when you have a single platform to wrap that around but both of you both of you and I have worked in Enterprise I.T for decades and we know most places are not that clean they are like there's feel sap running on HP ux there's still some DAC systems there's still applications athlete being developed on Mainframe there's some plow stuff there's some VM stuff there's now kubernetes stuff how should ctOS cios approach the
concept of platform teams see they look to deploy platform teams for net new platforms or should it be a more holistic view of you know how do we do this entire process across different Solutions platforms yeah I mean it's definitely the latter because I don't think a single platform will ever work it's kind of the same way that we think about multi-cloud multi-cloud is not something that you actively think and decide to do multi-cloud is something that just happens to you because of M A's because
of different teams having you know different historical preferences uh maybe it's because one single Cloud does one thing very well and you need that specific feature so you know multi-cloud kind of happens and running applications on multiple platforms for the same reasons also happen and so um it's not about the runtime itself it's not about you know we need to run everything on this you know cluster group of clusters Cloud whatever it's about setting a standard how to work securely comply and consistently repeatable across all
of those as a platform engineering to me is much more about the way you work and the standards you set and then encapsulating that into something that is easily consumable by your internal or external customer so the we I know we've gotten to this debate on the tech field day uh slack Channel I think me and you are of like mine so it's going to be tough to to look at this objectively but is this a real thing that's happening is the pushback that I've seen
so I'll pay the devil's advocate platform engineering is something that vendors made up to sell a platform like tab or openshift or Etc customers are not really doing platform engineering right I mean and again this all depends on the definition and kind of how you look at the problem and I think doing openshift or doing roll your own kubernetes or doing type that'll make sense for a piece of the puzzle platform engineering should be I think again not something a vendor here on the show floor
will push to us but it should be something that the advocate in terms of this is how the industry should work together um and again it's much less about a single product from one of the vendors here that you can buy but it's much more about figuring out how platform engineering as a practice should land within your organization um you know I'm a technologist by heart I was trained as an engineer but I learned very quickly the technology is as useful as the adoption rate within
the Enterprise and that is I think kind of the next iteration of platform engineering if you look at it from that you know devops angle is how do we make sure teams work in the same way use the same tools use the same ways of work so that we're consistent you know repeatable using all of the security compliance features that we need to use so it's much less a technology discussion you know should we use openshift or tap or whatever and much more about okay we
have a specific use case for I don't know running sap on uh on a bare metal Cloud somewhere and can we make that process of deploying updating operating that system repeatable and consistently yeah so as I think about some of the concepts and some of the challenges that I've had over my career uh it's usually around collaboration it is so if the sap basis team wants which is the equivalent of the app team or app development team if they want to lay down a new version
or a new landscape for test and Dev typically that interaction between the infrastructure team and the basis team may not always be prescribed it may not always be smooth it's definitely not repeatable so how does the platform team come in and help that help help fix that now I think we can take a lot of lessons from kubernetes openstack the cloud you're a big you're big in uh Consulting in the Hashi Corp World with terraform and taking these Concepts even if you can't take the tools
I think the concepts work beyond the tooling itself and now you can set up you know it may not today be automated but the interface is the same the basics team can come after team can come to the infrastructure team and ask for a thing in a certain way so that then it's well defined so we all know what we're asking for and getting yeah well I mean a lot of it comes down to I think the analogy with um kind of the the cloud principles
that works um and specifically having something that is self-service and On Demand and so thinking about the way you work not as something hey I can help you and you have to wait for me like you're an app Dev I'm an infrastructure guy you follow a support ticket with me you have to wait three weeks I do work and then you can go on with whatever you're doing that is synchronous waiting for each other that doesn't make sense and platform engineering at least the promise of
it will make sure that the thing you need is available to you on demand and you don't need me to actually execute that thing or get that thing and so Cloud does that right you as an app Dev can go into a cloud provision something that you need and you don't need anyone you don't need to talk a lot to anyone you're not dependent on anyone you can just do your thing and so applying those same principles to basically everything we need and do within the
Enterprise I.T I think that's kind of the promise of platform engineering creating something that is available to you standardized consistent repeatable with all of the right security controls in place with all of the right cost controls in place um and so platform engineering kind of has to sit in between the consumers and the providers and so you know Cloud can be a provider your internal data center team can be a provider app devs can be in consumer or app owners can be a consumer that is
up to the Enterprise of course you cannot Define which groups to consume my services which groups provide those Services platform engineering has to sit in between making it asynchronously available on demand self-service so does all this mean that devops as a concept is deprecated I don't think so no I mean uh it will evolve um but I think the core tenets of devops you know collaborating removing those walls making sure that you have a single shared goal to work towards I think that's more relevant than
ever and I think the a big change is and especially in perceptions what gets operated I think in the ideal of devops is that developers and operators are working together those two teams are collaborating to do steady state right I think platform engineering has definitely has a role in steady state they they secure the platform but you can layer uh devops as an operating model on top of platform engineering I agree yeah and the platform can the platform engineering team can be responsible for the platform
but operating the app in production can still be a collaboration between the developers yeah so exactly so the way I think about this is the platform engineering team provide kind of the standards and the way you should operate but they don't actually operate it for you they provide all of the scaffolding all of the tools all of the I don't know documentation all of the this is how we do stuff and then the team that owns an application will develop it and also operate it but
they're helped and supported by the platform engineering team all right Joe did we miss anything in the conversation I do not think so so one of the things I would love to see over the next a few months year year two few years it's how platform engineering evolves devops when we're talking about devops seven or eight years ago has now evolved to something I think we can all pretty much agree upon I'm wondering if platform engineering will do the same I don't care what you call
it you can call it platform engineering you call it devops you can just call it it these problems exist there are platforms get more and more diverse more and more complicated we thought Cloud would simplify our I.T landscape it has done nothing but make it more complex definitely enabled it but with that enablement has come complexity if you want to learn more about the CTO advisor you can follow us on the web the ctoadvisor.com both me and yo are prolific on the social media platforms whether
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