Platform Engineering ❤️ Developer Experience

Transcript

1. Platform Engineering ❤ Developer Experience Nicolas Byl Improving the inner Loop 09/10/2025
2. A tale about shoemakers…
3. Why care about Developer Experience?
4. • Increased Productivity • Psychological Safety • Making new environments and products accessible • Focus on business value • Reduced Turnover Happy Developer get shit done!
5. 5 Inner and Outer Loop
6. New E.ON PowerPoint Master 6 • The inner loop should be a part of your platform • And all dependencies should be provided to the inner loop Inner Loop DORA Accelerate State of DevOps Report 2024
7. Reproducible Distributable Complete Offline Capable New E.ON PowerPoint Master 7 How do we want our development environment?
8. A (very subjective) history lesson
9. • Virtual Machine containing all development tools, IDEs and needed dependencies • Hand-crafted • Distributes via file share, download link • Until the updates are coming in Golden VM
10. • A tool to create virtual machines for development • Provision your development environment inside via Shell, Ansible, etc. • Mounts your repository directory into it • IDE running outside Vagrant
11. • The IDE running inside an environment with all the bells and whistles (e.g. Kubernetes) • Usage via the browser • Eclipse Che, gitpod, GitHub Codespaces • Great security, not so great to debug your application Web-IDE’s
12. Solution Approaches
13. Classic Abstraction
14. New E.ON PowerPoint Master • Developing against an abstraction like the Java Persistence API • At development time, use an in memory implementation • In production switch to something more suitable JPA
15. 15 • Needs to be implemented for every dependency like database, message queue, … • Hard for cross-process application • Does not scale across ecosystems • Easy to implement and understand • Established practice with lots solutions for all major ecosystems… • …for databases Pros & Cons
16. Remote Abstraction
17. 17 • CNCF project proving a middleware • Allows decoupling from underlying infrastructure • Single HTTP API for state, messaging, remote calls, workflows, … dapr
18. So now, we have all the puzzle pieces?
19. 19 • New infrastructure to be maintained and learned • Brings a lot of own concepts to handle • Brings a (local) network hop to your middleware • Support and SDKs for all major ecosystems • One dependency instead of many • Portable across ecosystems, e.g. all callbacks are HTTP calls • Backends can be switched at runtime Pros & Cons
20. Development Containers
21. New E.ON PowerPoint Master 21 • Describe all needed features for your project in a YAML file • The IDE will rebuild the environment on opening the repo • Install external dependencies, IDE plugins, packages, … Development Containers
22. 22 • Needs docker or another container runtime • Easy to distribute, because it’s a file in a git repo • Reproducible • Once built, capable for offline usage • Can essentially do everything, a container can do Pros & Cons
23. So now, we have all the puzzle pieces?
24. But what about the outer loop?
25. score
26. 26 • CNCF project to abstract • Abstract description of the application’s external dependencies • Generate manifests for Docker, Kubernetes, etc. for development and deployment • Works great… • …for state stores and pubsub score
27. But now, we’re good?
28. 28 But what about serverless?
29. 29 • Full parity can only be achieved partially • Localstack et al. bring the most used services, but not everything • Sorry, you are chained to the developer tools of your provider Why developer experience fails for serverless applications?
30. New E.ON PowerPoint Master 30 • Serverless framework for AWS • Instead of bringing the service to the developer, it brings the developer to the services • Dependencies deployed in AWS • Functions are being executed locally • Don’t try it on german ICE’s SST
31. 31 Why developer experience fails for serverless applications?
32. Where do we stand?
33. Thank you
34. https://jobs.eon.com/en?filter=comp any%3AE.ON+Digital+Technology+ GmbH BTW, we are hiring