Today I'm starting my third platform engineering job. During the interview process, I had a few people ask me what exactly a platform engineer does, and I realized that…
- I've had my own short answer—"a platform engineer finds and reduces friction in the engineering organization"—but that's more an example than a proper definition, plus it doesn't cover everything.
- There are a bunch of confusing/contradictory answers floating around the internet if you just search it. This is made worse by vendors who seem to want to gatekeep the term to sell products. (Can you really even be a platform engineer if you're not running an IDP??? Contact our sales team!)
Anyway, I though it'd be useful to try and sum up the things that platform engineering is/does in a succinct definition. Keep Reading (5 minutes) →
A couple people have asked me for my impressions of Nomad. I used it a little bit back before 1.0, but haven't touched it for ~8 years so I'm going in with relatively fresh eyes.
The "stack" here is Vault, Consul, and Nomad. Here's a snippet of what they do:
- Vault: secrets management. As well as basic key/value stuff, it can provision things like database credentials on demand.
- Consul: service discovery and configuration store.
- Nomad: container scheduling. Basically, give it declarative manifests of apps to run and it'll figure out placements. Pretty advanced in terms of scheduling; it can do blue/green by default, plus any constraints you'd like (e.g. keeping services from being all on the same node/rack, or running one instance of a service on every node.) Not just containers either; it can do raw exec, Java, firecracker VMs, etc.
Keep Reading (4 minutes) →