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What Are The Key Challenges a Platform Team Experiences?

With the increased reliance on various technologies for software development, both software and hardware need to grow along with those technologies to provide reliable and secure services. However, this need has led to creating more complex solutions than ever. Thus, the importance of robust infrastructure has come to the forefront to deliver these solutions reliably at a global scale. Due to these facts, the platform team has to face different challenges to provide and maintain this infrastructure without affecting the software development lifecycle (SDLC) or end-users.

What Is a Platform Team?

We have Dev for development, QA for testing, and likewise, the platform team for managing the infrastructure of an organization. This infrastructure includes both internal SDLC resources like CI/CD pipelines, staging/testing environments, production resources, and in most cases, managing software deployments. The platform team will handle most operational aspects of an SDLC. They are the key component that manages most of DevOps tools and platforms, bringing the full benefits of DevOps.

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Oops, We’re Multi-Cloud: A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Surviving

Over the last few years, enterprises have adopted multi-cloud strategies in an effort to increase flexibility and choice and reduce vendor lock-in. According to Flexera's 2020 State of the Cloud Report most companies embrace multi-cloud, with 93% of enterprises having a multi-cloud strategy. In a recent Gartner survey of public cloud users, 81% of respondents said they are working with two or more providers. Multi-cloud makes so many things more complicated that you need a damn good reason to justify this. At Humanitec, we see hundreds of ops and platform teams a year, and I am often surprised that there are several valid reasons to go multi-cloud. I also observe that those teams which succeed are those that take the remodeling of workflows and tooling setups seriously.

What Is Multi-Cloud Computing?

Put simply, multi-cloud means: an application or several parts of it are running on different cloud-providers. These may be public or private, but typically include at least one or more public providers. It may mean data storage or specific services are running on one cloud providers and others on another. Your entire setup can run on different cloud providers in parallel. This is distinct from hybrid cloud services where one component is running on-premise and other parts of your application are running in the cloud.

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Why Cloud Native? Speed, Stability, and Full Cycle Development

The emergence of “cloud-native” technologies and practices, such as microservices, cloud computing, and DevOps, has enabled innovative organizations to respond and adapt to market changes more rapidly than their competitors. Just look at the success of the initial web “unicorns”, Spotify, Netflix, and Google. Not every company can be a unicorn, but there is much to learn from the early adopters of the cloud.

The Benefits of Being Cloud-Native

Spotify’s now-famous “squad, chapters, and guilds” organizational model ultimately led to the creation of their applications as independent microservices, which in turn supported the rapid rate of change they desired. Through a combination of a compelling vision and the whole-scale adoption of cloud services, Netflix was able to out-innovate existing market incumbents in the video streaming space. And Google’s approach to collaboration, automation, and solving ops problems using techniques inspired by software development enabled them to scale to a global phenomenon over the past two decades.