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Your Platform is Not an Island: Embracing Evolution in Your Ecosystem is a presentation by Rachael Wannacott that explores the evolving nature of platform engineering, especially within large enterprises like Fidelity International.

The presentation is structured around several key themes:

Business Value vs. Developer Experience: Rachael emphasizes that platforms should ultimately deliver business value, with developer experience (DevEx) serving as a crucial lever rather than the ultimate goal.
Platform as a System: A platform is not merely a product but a system within a larger ecosystem. It must balance developer experience with measurable business outcomes.
Integration and Collaboration: Successful platform design requires considering organizational maturity, structure, and culture. Integrating these elements helps create platforms that align with broader business goals.
Challenges of Organizational Scale: Enterprises face unique challenges, including legacy infrastructures and diverse team structures. This complexity necessitates a holistic approach to platform design that aligns with business and technology strategies.
Technical and Cultural Shifts: Transitioning from legacy systems like Cloud Foundry to newer technologies such as Kubernetes involves overcoming platform-specific challenges and addressing organizational silos.

Rachael shares insights from Fidelity's journey in platform engineering, highlighting the importance of evolving with technology while ensuring platforms act as bridges, not islands, to connect various organizational functions.

This is the end of the AI-generated content.

As with most forms of engineering it is easy to talk about theory in the abstract, but typically more nuanced to implement. Platform engineering is no exception. While the term has become increasingly popular over the last few years, it is a concept that is organically evolving within industry. For many Platform Engineering began as a means to overcome the challenges of consistent adoption of DevOps across an organization, but increasingly it is being sold as a way to improve the Developer Experience. While sociotechnical design, culture and developer experience have emerged as defining factors in successful platforms they require a more holistic view to platform design. This talks addresses the elephant in the room, that platforms are really about business value and while DevEx is a leading factor in achieving this, it is second to it. Each organization needs to reconcile current maturity, culture, and desired outcome to design the platform that delivers the greatest business value.

One size does not fit all: In many cases the most technically elegant solution may not be the most valuable deliverable. This talk discusses how to weigh up developer experience, measurable profit, and platform best practice to create platforms that deliver more immediate value to the business. Rachael shares the lessons of first-hand experience building a strategic platform that fits into a wider software development lifecycle across the Enterprise, and discovering that 'Your platform is not an island'.

Speaker

Rachael Wonnacott

Associate Director for Container Platform Engineering @Fidelity International

Rachael is an accomplished software engineer who has dedicated the past decade to platforms. As Associate Director for container platform engineering at Fidelity International she helps drive platform initiatives that improve the developer experience in the enterprise environment. With a background in astrophysics, she brings a scientific mindset to engineering challenges and advocates for open-source and peer-review. She currently leads the greenfield build of a strategic Kubernetes platform on AWS EKS. Her work keeps her engaged with DevEx, the application lifecycle, and all things supply chain security.

Rachael is passionate about fostering collaborative, transparent, and scalable engineering cultures. Throughout her career, she has worn many hats, including Technical Leader, Cloud Architect, and Engineering Manager.Leading her to speak at major global events including KubeCon, CloudNativeCon and PlatformCon last year.

Rachael is also focused on challenging traditional organisational design through technology strategy. As a proponent of treating organisations as sociotechnical systems, she utilises Domain Driven Design and Team Topologies methodologies to redefine enterprise norms. In an ambition to share learning with wider audiences she’s a keen attendee of smaller bespoke conferences in London, proudly helping to found FastFlowConf in 2023.

Rachael is delighted to be invited to speak at QCon London to talk all things Developer Experience.