Platform engineering generally is a useful asset to a company, however there are a variety of methods groups have to implement so as to drive success.
In a chat at PlatformCon 2025 in NYC final week, Preeti Somal, senior VP of engineering at Temporal, gave a chat in regards to the human facet of platform engineering. She gave seven methods to comply with to make sure that platform groups aren’t overlooking this significant piece of the puzzle.
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Have a transparent mission
In keeping with Somal, Temporal’s mission is to construct developer-friendly instruments which can be dependable. Its brand resembles a defend and its mascot is a tardigrade, a creature identified for being just about indestructible. They will survive in excessive temperatures and pressures, and might face up to air deprivation, radiation, dehydration, and hunger.
The truth is, the corporate despatched a plushie of their mascot into house together with a Raspberry Pi simply to show how resilient it’s. “We had been working workflows, and naturally, in some unspecified time in the future the Raspberry Pi misplaced connectivity, after which you can see that because the machine was coming again into orbit and picked up connectivity, the workflow picked up from precisely the place it had dropped off and began executing.”
The ethical of the story is to dwell your organization’s mission in every thing you do, even all the way down to the corporate branding.
- Make it simple to get began
“Make it so easy to make use of that it’s a no brainer and everyone within the engineering group begins utilizing it,” she stated.
She stated she realized this lesson throughout her time at Yahoo, which was a giant OpenStack store. One of many issues that her staff did was construct an answer that allowed engineers on the firm to request digital machines, no questions requested.
That made it really easy for individuals to get began, which actually helped platform adoption, and issues simply snowballed from there, Somal stated.
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Discover your clients and bootstrap with them
She stated that it’s essential to search out the teams that profit from the platform you’re constructing and work carefully collectively. Temporal, for instance, brings in its neighborhood frequently to speak about what they’re constructing.
One other instance Somal shared was that when she was at Yahoo, her staff spent about six to eight months constructing a platform as a service undertaking utilizing Mesosphere. In the meantime, one other staff in one other group was constructing with a brand new know-how referred to as Kubernetes.
“We had our blinders on and had been like, ‘we spent eight months doing this, and Kubernetes is simply so difficult. It’s not going to occur.’ After all, that was an enormous mistake. We should always have partnered with the staff that was truly going to make use of this platform and constructed this factor collectively. We should always have checked out that collectively.”
She stated a key a part of this technique can be to get early wins, in any other case it’s simple for initiatives to linger and die a gradual demise.
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Speak about it
The identical principals of dev rel round merchandise additionally matter with platforms. Despite the fact that with platforms your clients are different workers throughout the group, you continue to have to put it up for sale to ensure that your platform to be seen and adopted.
“You assume ‘if you happen to construct it, they may come.’ Otherwise you’re so concerned in constructing the right resolution that you simply’re not speaking about it. It’s worthwhile to.”
When Somal was at Yahoo, for instance, they put posters within the kitchens and made and distributed t-shirts in regards to the platform they had been constructing to unfold consciousness across the firm.
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Be dependable
In order for you individuals to truly use the platform, it needs to be dependable. Not solely does the know-how have to be dependable, however the staff must be dependable and available to reply any questions or handle issues.
As an illustration, she shared that Snap tales use Temporal, and there’s a large spike that happens each New Years Eve. “We confirmed up for them. We had been within the workplace. We had been with them on a Zoom as New Years kicked in and the spikes began taking place,” she stated.
In case your platform isn’t dependable (and also you aren’t dependable), then there are such a lot of different choices to select from, and transferring to a different platform is basically not that onerous.
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Rejoice success typically
Somal says that platform engineering groups typically function in part of the group that no one’s actually heard of, and are doing their work relatively quietly. “When a enterprise unit is profitable, we might or might not get a shoutout,” she stated.
At Temporal they’ve been practising celebrating successes even for easy issues like discount in CPU utilization. She says that each little factor makes a distinction, and recognizing these successes will enhance morale.
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Embrace shifts
And eventually, it’s essential to not stand nonetheless. Expertise is consistently evolving, and platform groups ought to adapt to those modifications.
One of many methods Temporal is embracing shifts is to determine its AI evolution by partnering with early adopters, studying, and iterating.