foreword
Over the past decade or so, business leaders have come to accept that they can’t ignore, sideline, or outsource digital technology. This technology needs to be embedded in the core of business strategy to reach modern markets and deliver world-class services to customers. But environments and infrastructure have always been a bottleneck for developing and maintaining digital services.
The book you’re about to read provides comprehensive guidance for an organization to plan, build, and run an engineering platform that fulfills the needs of its software delivery teams.
Leaders might wish that this was a solved problem, easily answered by choosing a cloud vendor for their developers. But the cloud is only the beginning of a platform strategy. A cloud provides low-level, general-purpose building blocks rather than an out-of-the-box solution. The parade of trends, including DevOps, PaaS, site reliability engineering, and now platform engineering is evidence of a persistent gap between raw cloud infrastructure and the needs of any given organization. The organization needs to use the cloud as the starting point for building capabilities tailored to the specific business needs, processes, and governance that will enable their developers.