This talk is a recording of my presentation at the FI-Forum in Frankfurt am Main in November 2023. The topic: the Platform Plane and how to develop high-quality software in record time. Platform engineering is the foundation of the digital factory and enables teams to truly practice DevOps.
The Challenges in the Financial Sector#
In my daily work, I collaborate with clients across various industries and lead DevOps transformations. Especially in the financial sector, I consistently see the same top five challenges: legacy application landscapes and processes, budget constraints (delivering more with less money), talent management (how to attract top-qualified employees), culture and change management, and the alignment between IT and business goals.
What I typically see at these companies is a broken value stream. The business has great plans and writes them into Jira tickets and Word documents. These get thrown over the wall of confusion to the development team, then to testing, then to operations, and in the end the customer receives something that does not match what was ordered at all. The value stream is interrupted by silo organizations with different goals.
DevOps as the Answer#
DevOps is a mindset, a culture, and a set of technical practices that allows us to organize along the value stream and continuously deliver value. It is not just about Development and Operations. The term DevOps is actually misleading. Whether DevSecOps, BizDevOps, or any other variation: it is about bringing all people, processes, and technologies together to continuously deliver value.
What do companies want to achieve with DevOps? More value for money, faster time to market, higher quality, better customer satisfaction, and top-qualified employees. The research confirms this: the State of DevOps Report shows that companies with DevOps deploy up to 973 times more frequently to production. The numbers are impressive.
The Scaling Problem#
When you do DevOps, the battle cry is “You build it, you run it, you own it.” That sounds simple, but the reality is complex. You need infrastructure (cloud or on-prem), runtime, a CI/CD pipeline, monitoring, security tools, collaboration tools, and you need to keep costs under control. All these tools need to be maintained, integrated, updated, and access needs to be secured. And at the top, you actually wanted to develop the application that delivers business value.
In large enterprises, you often see multiple such stacks being built in parallel. The wheel gets reinvented, inconsistencies and redundancies emerge, and developers struggle to maintain this stack. The complexity is simply too great. The cognitive load on teams is too high, and they can no longer focus on delivering software.
The Digital Factory#
To solve this challenge, we need a clear structure. Imagine a company that builds drones (or in your case: software). At the portfolio level, leadership has a vision and pulls out the most promising ideas. At the product level, product managers take these ideas and extract features. At the team level, product owners and teams work on user stories and use their CI/CD pipeline.
Here is where the platform level comes in: a platform team provides the CI/CD pipelines and tools so that product teams do not need to reinvent the wheel. They can build directly on a standardized platform and work productively.
The whole thing becomes a digital factory. You can see the three ways of DevOps here: fast value delivery to the customer, collecting feedback (telemetry data back to developers), and continuous learning (customer satisfaction and market data back to leadership). At the top, we have Lean Portfolio Management connecting strategy to execution. At the bottom, we have the platform team as the foundation.
Platform Engineering in Detail#
The platform team creates an internal product: the platform. This platform contains everything the product teams need: environments, CI/CD pipelines, access rights, security, monitoring, and more. The platform is provided as self-service.
Important: the platform provides capabilities that are used by the product teams. For example, when it comes to monitoring, the platform team provides the monitoring solution. But the product teams monitor their own solutions. The platform team does not do it for them.
Product teams generate value for the customer. The platform team generates value for the teams. Platform engineering enables DevOps in the product teams.
The Zühlke Platform Plane#
Gartner, BCG, and McKinsey clearly state: platform engineering is absolutely essential for the future. By 2027, 75% of organizations will have built such a platform.
At Zühlke, we built the Platform Plane together with LGT, a private bank from Liechtenstein. It includes:
- Application Runtime: Kubernetes as a Service with excellent developer experience through a portal and application tunnels
- DevSecOps: Automatic license scanning, secret detection, and SAST
- Access Management: Onboard in the morning, offboard in the evening. All rights to repositories and tools are immediately revoked
- Security: Policy enforcement and network zones
- Observability: FinOps and the OpenTelemetry stack
- GitOps: For continuous value delivery
The architecture follows a clear principle: at the top, people work with the tools (we do not abstract tools away). Next to it, the platform provides a self-service portal and CLI. At the bottom, we integrate the various tools through adapters, not directly with each other, so no “big ball of mud” emerges. Tools can easily be replaced or new ones integrated.
What the Platform Plane Provides#
The self-service portal allows onboarding partners, creating spaces (projects/products), and assigning rights. You can see the entire cluster listed, connect directly via CLI, and work within the cluster. There is a standardized catalog of software components that are created with automatic naming schemes, managed passwords, and automatic integration into the monitoring system.
Built-in security is directly integrated: repositories, containers, and images are automatically scanned. The integration into the CI/CD landscape is deep, with automatic pipelines. The OpenTelemetry stack with logs, metrics, and dashboards is directly implemented. Every application that is added automatically gets dashboards and is automatically integrated.
The Platform Plane is available to everyone through the Open Platform Plane Association for those who become members.
Key Takeaways#
- Platform engineering forms the foundation of the digital factory. It enables teams to practice DevOps and continuously deliver value.
- Cognitive load must be reduced. Product teams should be able to focus on value creation, not on maintaining infrastructure and tools.
- Self-service is critical. The platform must be provided as a product with a self-service portal and CLI, not as a ticket-based service.
- Do not abstract tools, integrate them. Developers continue working with the tools, but the platform provides them in a standardized and integrated way.
- Product teams generate value for customers, platform teams generate value for teams. This clear separation of concerns is the key to scaling.
- We are entering the age of industrialized software development. Platform engineering is the key enabler.