Scaling teams are hard. A platform team done right can help ease the hardships. The platform team does not have to be isolated from the rest of the team; it can be integrated with the infrastructure team to build a system that will be used in many markets. This also includes miscellaneous subsystems.

The Platform team

The platform team is not a part of the product teams, it acts as an engineering efficiency team.

  • Infrastructure management is one of the responsibility of the platform team. Ensuring best practices and deep understanding of infrastructure in the cloud or onsite
  • Platform team has non-functional requirements

Expertise

The experience and expertise needed on platform team depends on the structure of the company.

  • Generally, here are the expertise you will need within your platform team: container orchestration and containerization, cloud management, vendor management, pipeline management, upstream management, soft skill and people management, developer training and teaching, documentation development
  • Switch between members such that there are domain level experts and then do extreme table pair programming

Epilogue

The platform team is a new concept enabled by new technologies coming to market

Mandates

Automation

  • Everything that has to be done twice should be automated
  • Keep to DRY Principle as much as possible
  • Build a highly efficient platform
  • Efficiency lies in iterating small features rather than a big deployment
  • Self-service
  • Sufficient and continuous documentation
  • Training is needed for developers
  • The overhead of training new developers should be taken into account

Principles The team looking to stand up to its decisions

Authority

  • The success or failure of an platform team lies in the decision it makes
  • Platform team should have visibility and authority over the wider organization to have a better chance of success
  • DevOps is a culture not a role
  • The platform team should be able to evangelize this
  • Accountability
  • They have the authority to make changes to fundamental building blocks of each of the systems

Source