Going Platformless in the Era of Building Platforms

Welcome back to another edition of the Platform Engineering Meetup. This month we welcome Lakmal Warusawithana from WSO2 to talk about going Platformless in the era of building Platforms.

In the rapidly evolving tech landscape, building and maintaining robust platforms has become both a necessity and a challenge for organizations. In this talk, I will share our experience of building an internal developer platform, highlighting the hurdles we encountered and the strategies we employed to overcome them.

In this session, I will discuss:

• The complexities and technical challenges faced during our platform development journey, including issues related to scalability, security, and integration.
• How we used cell-based architecture combined with technologies and tools such as Kubernetes, GitHub Action, API Gateway, Prometheus, Envoy, OpenSearch, Keda, eBPF, and Cilium for service mesh management (and more), detailing the implementation processes, and best practices that enabled us to create a robust and efficient system.
• How we navigated through these challenges and the lessons learned, providing insights into our problem-solving approaches and decision-making processes.
• The critical expertise required and the significant resource investments involved, detailing the skills and knowledge necessary to implement and maintain such a platform.
• The benefits and practicality of choosing a platformless strategy, especially for organizations lacking the necessary in-house capabilities, and how this approach can streamline operations and reduce costs.

Join us to explore the realities of building internal developer platforms versus adopting platformless solutions, and understand how to make informed decisions that align with your organization's strengths and strategic goals.

Agenda

6:00pm to 6:30pm - Mixer and refreshments
6:30pm to 7:15pm - Talk