A RedMonk Conversation: Spicy Takes, Platform Engineering, and Dynamic Configuration Management (With Drew Oetzel)

When it comes to highly opinionated marketing, driving the outrage button, we can't think of a more resonant recent campaign than Humanitec's DevOps is dead, long live Platform Engineering! In this video though we come to discuss platform orchestration and dynamic configuration management. So - a conversation between James Governor, co-founder of RedMonk, and Drew Oetzel, senior customer success engineer at Humanitec. What's the interplay between platform orchestration and platform engineering? Why should platform engineering care about this? What even is wrong with the current state of the art in configuration management? The truth is everybody does some platform engineering; everybody has some form of platform engineering. And at companies like Adobe or Google it can be really slick but at medium sized organisations, it might just be a couple of people clicking around in AWS. As Corey Quinn calls it “ClickOps” Congratulations. You're the platform engineering solution. You get to manually set something up as you go through tickets. According to Humanitec, at the heart of what a platform orchestrator does is it shuffles config files. So it's shuffling Terraform scripts, it's shuffling Helm charts, it's shuffling Kubernetes, YAMLs. Essentially undifferentiated heavy lifting. We discuss the current state of the art, but also what kind of tooling might offer a better, more automated experience for platform engineering teams. How we can avoid config file and script sprawl and focus on our jobs, automating the tedious interactions between dev and ops. Platform Engineering is about standardisation by design, and that happens as part of the process. Golden paths, platform orchestration, and dynamic configuration management.

This RedMonk Conversation was originally published in video form on May 24, 2023.