What this book covers

Chapter 1, Platform Engineering and the Art of Crafting Platforms, provides an introduction to platforms and IDPs. It covers the relevance of a product mindset and the ambition to build a system desired by users.

Chapter 2, Understanding Platform Architecture to Build Platforms as a Product, will guide you through all the relevant groundwork and approaches to creating your platform architecture. You will discover the value of the platform as a product, the first implementation of the thinnest viable platform, and how to observe and measure its success and adoption.

Chapter 3, Building the Foundation for Supporting Platform Capabilities, will walk you through the mandatory steps and processes of defining a solid foundation of a platform that can grow from an initial set of features toward key enterprise-supporting platform capabilities.

Chapter 4, Architecting the Platform Core – Kubernetes as a Unified Layer, provides insights into what makes Kubernetes the preferred platform for platform engineers. You will learn about the core integrations and relevant decisions we have to make before we can focus on extra enhancements.

Chapter 5, Integration, Delivery, and Deployment – Automation is Ubiquitous, provides you with a stable understanding of the complexity around building, deploying, testing, validating, securing, operating, releasing, and scaling software and how we can centralize and automate this experience with self-service capabilities.

Chapter 6, Build for Developers and Their Self-Service, reviews concepts around IDP integrations and shares best practices for building resilient, flexible, and user-oriented platforms.

Chapter 7, Building Secure and Compliant Products, elaborates on security standards frameworks, and trends; how to leverage the software bill of materials; and defining the right actions to secure the platform without limiting your capabilities. Furthermore, we show you how to ensure the app delivery process will provide hardened and secure software/container packages and how to use policy engine technologies.

Chapter 8, Cost Management and Best Practices, explains the concept of cost-increasing elements of a platform and how to optimize those costs. You will learn about tagging strategies, general cost optimization scenarios, how to use observability to identify optimization potential, and best practices to put them into practice.

Chapter 9, Choosing Technical Debt to Unbreak Platforms, provides you with tools, frameworks, and methods to actively manage your technical debts. Like with costs, technical debts can grow and will have a negative impact on your platform if untreated.

Chapter 10, Crafting Platform Products for the Future, emphasizes the imperative of change and our role as platform engineers in fostering change in a controlled way, balancing reliability and innovation.