Within the grand scheme of software program improvement, platform engineering is a comparatively new self-discipline. As such, platform engineering groups are nonetheless determining finest 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 guide “Platform Engineering: A Information for Technical, Product, and Individuals Leaders,” explored frequent errors she sees groups making and gives recommendation on methods to keep away from them.
“We expect that platform engineering is the subsequent logical evolution that’s wanted by the know-how business to essentially deal with lots of the underlying complexity that we’re seeing right this moment, particularly in massive know-how organizations,” she stated. “We expect this can be a crucial matter, however we additionally assume it’s a really laborious factor to do. We’ve seen lots of people try to wrestle to construct out profitable platform groups, and so we wrote this guide as an try to assist individuals who have been combating platform engineering to do a greater job.”
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A standard mistake individuals make is just not placing the suitable individuals on the workforce, akin to solely together with software program engineers or solely together with operations. Platform engineering groups want a mixture of individuals with totally different abilities, together with software program engineers, DevOps, SREs, infrastructure engineers, and techniques engineers.
Software program engineering is a core a part of platform engineering, since you want to have the ability to write significant software program in an effort 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 in case you’re going to essentially have the ability to create the type of complexity discount that issues.”
Alternatively, in case your platform workforce is barely software program engineers, that introduces a complete different set of issues. Software program engineers could 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 in case you should not have operational possession … If you wish to have a platform workforce that’s not going to get defunded, you higher be working some issues that individuals truly rely on … You’ll construct higher software program in case you run it and preserve it in manufacturing. However the massive value of that is upkeep, it’s operations, it’s upgrades. You want individuals with these system abilities.”
Not having a product strategy is one other mistake platform groups make, as this results in constructing in options that customers aren’t truly utilizing. Platform groups must be working with their finish customers to grasp how they may use the platform.
“You’ve bought to have that buyer empathy in your platform workforce that truly cares in regards to 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 truly meets their wants and calls for, and never simply what you assume is true,” she stated.
There are two main failure factors generally seen when constructing the platform, Fournier identified. One is that the platform workforce builds what they assume their customers want, and the other 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 type of Rube Goldberg architectures that themselves create the identical issues that you just bought within the first place,” Fournier stated. “After getting a Rube Goldberg structure, it’s laborious to construct one thing that your prospects can extra simply plug into and use. It’s laborious to evolve. You develop into an increasing number of of a bottleneck.”
In line with Fournier, in case you can mix software program engineering abilities, operational abilities, and a product focus, that’s an amazing baseline for constructing out a platform group.
One other main mistake is constructing a v2. What she means by that is that generally platform groups will discover themselves in a scenario the place they have already got a system, however they’ll’t actually incrementally change it, in order that they go and construct a wholly new system.
Issues come up as a result of regardless of the way you assume customers are utilizing your system, you possibly can’t actually know for positive. Odds are, there’s some workforce or particular person counting on some a part of it, and shifting on to one thing else will end in reliability points. Subsequently, constructing a V2 is a excessive threat operation.
One other manner during which it’s a excessive threat operation relies on the way in which your workforce is ready up. She referred to Simon Wardley’s pioneers, settlers, and city planners idea. The pioneers are those doing actually progressive work, who’re comfy with threat.
“They discover one thing that 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, they usually prefer to type of take one thing that’s messy and clear it up and make it a bit of bit extra steady 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 type of massive system that has plenty of totally different trade-offs for effectivity and progress.”
A V2 of a undertaking is usually began by a pioneer, however platform groups are often not made up of pioneers; profitable platform groups usually include settlers and city planners.
Even when a platform workforce managed to consider a brand new progressive factor, there’s the difficulty of migrations. Fournier stated there’s truly a giant alternative for platform engineering groups to determine methods to make migrations much less painful.
“If all people on this room takes away one factor, assume very laborious about how one can make migrations a lot simpler in your prospects,” she stated.