Starting and Scaling a Platform Engineering Team
Talkat KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 · on Thursday, 2025-04-03· at 11:00· Level 1 | Hall Entrance N10 | Room F·
summary
Recommendation: start a platform team when shared “glue” becomes a bottleneck around 50–250 engineers; platform work must combine software engineering, operations ownership, and product management. Concrete failures include a six‑person data platform that supports ~300 product engineers, suffers 50 incidents per week, and restarts four times after trying vendor handoffs, rigid SLAs, and “build-your-own” databases. Successful path raises abstraction, targets real use cases (config + combined SQL/search), avoids grand rewrites, and keeps multi‑cloud ops responsibility (Cassandra Elasticsearch Postgres).
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction and Agenda
- 1:19The Role of Platform Teams
- 3:33Goals of Platform Engineering
- 6:44Team Skills and Composition
- 10:50Early Team Strategy
- 12:30Platform Execution Lifecycle
- 17:14Four Key Questions for Success
- 19:05Case Study: Failed Starts
- 20:37Case Study: Iterative Resets
- 26:05Case Study: Product Thinking
- 29:41Final Takeaways
