Within the grand scheme of software program improvement, platform engineering is a comparatively new self-discipline. As such, platform engineering groups are nonetheless determining greatest practices and messing up alongside the way in which.
In a chat at PlatformCon 2025 final week, Camille Fournier, CTO of Open Athena and co-author (alongside Ian Nowland) of the e-book “Platform Engineering: A Information for Technical, Product, and Individuals Leaders,” explored widespread errors she sees groups making and provides recommendation on the best way to keep away from them.
“We expect that platform engineering is the subsequent logical evolution that’s wanted by the expertise business to essentially deal with numerous the underlying complexity that we’re seeing right now, particularly in giant expertise organizations,” she stated. “We expect this can be a crucial subject, however we additionally suppose it’s a really arduous factor to do. We’ve seen lots of people attempt to battle to construct out profitable platform groups, and so we wrote this e-book as an try to assist individuals who had been battling platform engineering to do a greater job.”
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A typical mistake individuals make will not be placing the correct individuals on the group, reminiscent of solely together with software program engineers or solely together with operations. Platform engineering groups want a mixture of individuals with completely different abilities, together with software program engineers, DevOps, SREs, infrastructure engineers, and programs engineers.
Software program engineering is a core a part of platform engineering, since you want to have the ability to write significant software program as a way to handle complexity. “Past automation and past operations — each of that are extraordinarily necessary — you wish to be prepared to construct new software program merchandise,” Fournier stated. “You wish to be prepared to construct self-service interfaces and enhanced APIs and safety and high quality guardrails, however you want software program engineers on these groups if you happen to’re going to essentially be capable of create the form of complexity discount that issues.”
Alternatively, in case your platform group is just software program engineers, that introduces an entire different set of issues. Software program engineers might not wish to take into consideration operations. They wish to construct frameworks, they wish to construct a library, they wish to construct a blueprint, she defined.
“There isn’t any lasting worth if you happen to do not need operational possession … If you wish to have a platform group that isn’t going to get defunded, you higher be working some issues that individuals really depend upon … You’ll construct higher software program if you happen to run it and keep it in manufacturing. However the huge value of that is upkeep, it’s operations, it’s upgrades. You want individuals with these system abilities.”
Not having a product method is one other mistake platform groups make, as this results in constructing in options that customers aren’t really utilizing. Platform groups must be working with their finish customers to grasp how they may use the platform.
“You’ve received to have that buyer empathy in your platform group that really cares concerning the individuals which are going to make use of this software program and will get their enter on what you’re constructing, so that you just’re constructing one thing that really meets their wants and calls for, and never simply what you suppose is true,” she stated.
There are two main failure factors generally seen when constructing the platform, Fournier identified. One is that the platform group builds what they suppose their customers want, and the alternative downside is listening an excessive amount of to customers and implementing each single characteristic they want.
“If you find yourself on this characteristic manufacturing unit, you find yourself constructing these kind of Rube Goldberg architectures that themselves create the identical issues that you just received within the first place,” Fournier stated. “Upon getting a Rube Goldberg structure, it’s arduous to construct one thing that your prospects can extra simply plug into and use. It’s arduous to evolve. You develop into an increasing number of of a bottleneck.”
Based on Fournier, if you happen to can mix software program engineering abilities, operational abilities, and a product focus, that’s a terrific baseline for constructing out a platform group.
One other main mistake is constructing a v2. What she means by that is that typically platform groups will discover themselves in a scenario the place they have already got a system, however they will’t actually incrementally change it, so that they go and construct a completely new system.
Issues come up as a result of irrespective of the way you suppose customers are utilizing your system, you’ll be able to’t actually know for positive. Odds are, there’s some group or particular person counting on some a part of it, and transferring on to one thing else will lead to reliability points. Due to this fact, constructing a V2 is a excessive threat operation.
One other approach during which it’s a excessive threat operation relies on the way in which your group is ready up. She referred to Simon Wardley’s pioneers, settlers, and city planners idea. The pioneers are those doing actually revolutionary work, who’re comfy with threat.
“They discover one thing which may work, after which if they’re profitable, they’re adopted by people who find themselves extra like settlers who’re comfy with some ambiguity, and so they wish to form of take one thing that’s messy and clear it up and make it somewhat bit extra secure and scalable, after which over time you get the true city planners who wish to make this technique actually environment friendly and are very comfy on this kind of giant system that has plenty of completely different trade-offs for effectivity and progress.”
A V2 of a challenge is usually began by a pioneer, however platform groups are normally not made up of pioneers; profitable platform groups sometimes encompass settlers and city planners.
Even when a platform group managed to think about a brand new revolutionary factor, there’s the difficulty of migrations. Fournier stated there’s really a giant alternative for platform engineering groups to determine methods to make migrations much less painful.
“If everyone on this room takes away one factor, suppose very arduous about how one can make migrations a lot simpler in your prospects,” she stated.