When I grow up, I want to be a platform

Your organization has grown and now you need to break down product silos and leverage a common platform to move to the next big step. Join Sidney Shek and Diogo Lucas to hear to the ups and downs of a platformization journey, where they address the features you need to platformize and when, how much design is enough for a platform service, how to handle the mass adoption of your service, and more.

As engineers, once we start having more than one (micro)service or product in our architecture, we start thinking about sharing code, functionality, and seamless user experiences between systems. That’s the start of a platform. But you have so many decisions to make, such as deciding what features should be part of the platform and when; if you should go lightweight like drop-in libraries that are quick to adopt or heavyweight like frameworks that give a better integrated developer (and user) experience; how much extensibility to build in; how to make your platform extensible; how to address the classic hockey stick adoption pattern on your services; and if you change your organization structure or if the organization structure dictates the platform. Sidney Shek and Diogo Lucas describe a number of patterns (and anti-patterns) for designing a platform they’ve seen and implemented both from industry and as part of the platform powering Atlassian Cloud.