Culture
June 9

It’s time to get on the platform engineering Ferris Wheel!

The DevOps Infinity Loop doesn’t serve platform engineering well enough: IaC isn’t a first-class citizen and it doesn’t aid reasoning about DevEx sufficiently. The Ferris Wheel offers ways to understand development in single-player and multi-player modes, balances attention across application and infrastructure code, emphasizes the pace layers of the SDLC, and nuances Security and Observability.
Talk abstract

Models provide cognitive leverage for assessing the state of the world and for making predictions and plans. The platform engineering Ferris Wheel improves upon previous models in ways that help focus platform product road mapping to maximize ROI. 

The Wheel presents three single-player create/test loops (code/unit, integrate/integration, build/e2e) and three multi-player run/monitor loops (deploy/process monitor, release/differential monitor, operate/performance), with corresponding supply-chain security concerns. The varying balance of abstraction for application and infrastructure in each loop is emphasized.

  • IDPs support many Jobs To Be Done.
  • Developers switch between pro-code and no-code depending on context.
  • A “whole product” approach makes delivering value incrementally much easier.