Platform Engineering

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At organizations of every size, platforms are the tools that enable development and innovation at velocity. For most of the history of Information Technology, the concept of platforms has been to define the operating systems and programming languages that developers use to produce software. Everything else had been left to the discretion of the developers themselves.

In today’s world, with federated development teams, strict security and compliance requirements, and greater pressure on feature delivery the ad-hoc approach is no longer sufficient.

Enterprises of every kind rely on platform engineering to manage competing concerns by providing tools that accelerate development, maintaining flexibility of choice, while also ensuring compliance.

Redefined Behavior builds roadmaps for platforms, creating guiding principles for organizations as they embark on platform engineering initatives. Redefined Behavior also assists in implemenation of platform capabilities to realize the benefits of platforms, and can create enablement plans to assist in adoption of the platforms.

What concerns do you have for your organization?

Platform adoption
Discourage Shadow IT by developing platforms in such a way that it becomes easier, faster, and more compliant to use the platform than to work around the platform.
Improve and measure developer velocity
Onboard projects using the platform, and track how long it takes for the initial release, and subsequent releases. KPIs should include time to first release, and period of time between releases.
Measure codebase health
Using your developer platform, automate build processes. Produce report dashboards per project and per team to demonstrate test case coverage, flaky tests, and track success/failure rates over time.
Control costs of using expensive resources
Use a developer platform to issue access tokens or service accounts for expensive resources like LLM models, cloud products and other assets. Use automated lifecycle governance to provision, monitor, warn, and revoke access.
Manage deployments
Create automated CI/CD pipelines that use developer-initiated triggers to execute build, test and quality checks. Deployments to higher environments can be triggered by parties with higher levels of authorization to prevent ad-hoc deployment without slowing development due to process gate overhead.
Govern architectural adherance
Use inspection tooling to examine codebases and produce adherance reports.
Define KPIs to indicate success
  • Time to “Hello World”: How long does it take to build a basic app?
  • Count of New Projects: How many projects are created in a given time period?
  • Frequency of Deployments: How many deployments are executed in a given time period?
  • Bug to Fix Duration: How long between when a bug is reported and fixed?
  • Service Accounts Requested: How many keys are requested?
  • Utilization: What is the trend of use of APIs, AI, or other controlled resources in each environment?