Platform engineering could be a worthwhile asset to a corporation, however there are a variety of methods groups must implement with a view to drive success.
In a chat at PlatformCon 2025 in NYC final week, Preeti Somal, senior VP of engineering at Temporal, gave a chat concerning the human aspect of platform engineering. She gave seven methods to observe to make sure that platform groups aren’t overlooking this important 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 emblem resembles a defend and its mascot is a tardigrade, a creature identified for being just about indestructible. They’ll survive in excessive temperatures and pressures, and may stand up to air deprivation, radiation, dehydration, and hunger.
In actual fact, the corporate despatched a plushie of their mascot into house together with a Raspberry Pi simply to show how resilient it’s. “We have been operating 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 all the things you do, even right down to the corporate branding.
- Make it straightforward 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 discovered this lesson throughout her time at Yahoo, which was a giant OpenStack store. One of many issues that her workforce did was construct an answer that allowed engineers on the firm to request digital machines, no questions requested.
That made it really easy for folks to get began, which actually helped platform adoption, and issues simply snowballed from there, Somal stated.
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Discover your prospects and bootstrap with them
She stated that it’s vital to search out the teams that profit from the platform you’re constructing and work intently collectively. Temporal, for instance, brings in its group frequently to speak about what they’re constructing.
One other instance Somal shared was that when she was at Yahoo, her workforce spent about six to eight months constructing a platform as a service undertaking utilizing Mesosphere. In the meantime, one other workforce in one other group was constructing with a brand new know-how known as Kubernetes.
“We had our blinders on and have 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 must always have partnered with the workforce that was truly going to make use of this platform and constructed this factor collectively. We must always have checked out that collectively.”
She stated a key a part of this technique can also be to get early wins, in any other case it’s straightforward for initiatives to linger and die a sluggish dying.
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Discuss it
The identical principals of dev rel round merchandise additionally matter with platforms. Despite the fact that with platforms your prospects are different workers inside the group, you continue to must market it to ensure that your platform to be seen and adopted.
“You suppose ‘in the event you construct it, they’ll come.’ Otherwise you’re so concerned in constructing the right resolution that you simply’re not speaking about it. It’s essential.”
When Somal was at Yahoo, for instance, they put posters within the kitchens and made and distributed t-shirts concerning the platform they have been constructing to unfold consciousness across the firm.
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Be dependable
If you would like folks to really use the platform, it needs to be dependable. Not solely does the know-how should be dependable, however the workforce must be dependable and available to reply any questions or deal with considerations.
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 have been within the workplace. We have been with them on a Zoom as New Years kicked in and the spikes began occurring,” 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 shifting to a different platform is basically not that onerous.
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Have fun success typically
Somal says that platform engineering groups typically function in part of the group that no person’s actually heard of, and are doing their work relatively quietly. “When a enterprise unit is profitable, we could or could not get a shoutout,” she stated.
At Temporal they’ve been working towards 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 vital 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.
