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Treat your platform as a product

· 2 min read
Johannes Kleinlercher
kubriX Dev, platform engineer, systems architect

Team Topologies gave the platform engineering topic a huge momentum in 2019. And it hasn't lost its popularity since then.

As Team Topologies say:

Organizations that adopt a "platform as a product" approach can fundamentally transform and accelerate the value realization from their digital product development.

What are the benefits?

Implementing this platform principles leads to the following positive business impacts which are consistently seen:

  • 30% faster transformation implementation with Team Topologies, enabling quicker time-to-market for new offerings.

  • 25% reduction in context switching and a subsequent 20% increase in overall productivity among teams adopting Team Topologies.

  • 40% drop in deployment failures and a 35% decrease in mean time to recovery, bolstering organizational resilience through the adoption of Team Topologies.

Which technology should we use?

The platform manifest makes it clear that it is not about technology in the first place. Still, Kubernetes is widely being used as a base platform for very good reasons. It perfectly abstracts infrastructure and has a flexible API. However, it is not a software delivery platform by itself. Companies still need to build their platform on top of this base platform - a thing which is called nowadays "Internal Developer Platform" (IDP).

The building blocks of these platforms are often projects of the CNCF landscape or also commercial products in the cloud-native space.

However, CNCF doesn't give you advices which tools to use, and there are a lot! So it is still the companies job to evaluate projects and products, decide which ones are trustworthy and can help. Then they need to combine, configure and integrate them in a way that it feels like one curated product with high dev experience.

Build or buy - or both?

Building such a IDP takes time, expertise and experience - so it is worth to look for a company which helps you building such a product - an IDP distribution!

kubriX is a curated, opinionated, yet highly flexible IDP distribution, build from predefined bricks for Kubernetes.