Platform Team

Developers and operation

In the olden days, a company kept its developers quarantined in one department. They were well isolated from the serious business of operations. Operations had the people who racked machines, wired networks, and ran the databases and operating systems. Developers worked on applications. Operations worked on the infrastructure.

Programmable infrastructure

The boundaries haven’t just blurred, they’ve been erased and redrawn. That began before we even heard the word “DevOps” (as we’ll see later in The Fallacy of the “DevOps Team”). The rise of virtualization and cloud computing made infrastructure programmable. Open source ops tools made ops programmable, too. Virtual machine images and, later, containers and unikernels meant that programs became “operating systems.” When we look at the layers from the Foundationschapter, we see the need for software development up and down the stack. Likewise, we need operations up and down the stack.

Platform teams roles

What used to be just infrastructure and operations now rolls in programmable components. It becomes the platform that everything else runs on. Whether we’re in the cloud or in our own data center, we need a platform team that views application development as its customer.