A Comparison#
Whither Platform Engineering?#
Soon after I started working on IO, I went to a Platform Engineering meetup in San Francisco. This gathering was for people who were working to improve the productivity of their teams and companies by building internal developer platforms, which I might have called “methodologies”. These were the tools and best practices for building their companies’ products, which were often online software services.
The speakers talked about the challenges of getting support for their internal developer platforms, both from management and from developers, and it was clear that they were working from the middle to bring their technology efforts together in an orderly way. That makes sense in a lot of contexts, but as I listened, I thought “You’re building The Matrix. I’m building an Iron Man suit.”
WWTSD?#
“Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave… with a box of scraps!”
The mythology of Iron Man has long appealed to me. This probably goes back to my grandfather’s toolshed, a small outbuilding with several rooms, each containing implements, riggings, and spare parts that he’d collected as an auto mechanic, a hospital maintenance worker, and a small farm operator. One of his sons (my dad) built control systems for a steel mill, which was itself a kind of “platform engineering”, and he too had a garage full of tools that now contains generations of hands-on engineering magic.
None of my predecessors had the resources of Tony Stark, but we’ve all known the feeling of being stuck in a cave and needing to build something to get us out. And we’ve all learned that the way to get better is to build something and learn from it. Sometimes that’s an expensive project that requires a lot of planning and sometimes that’s a thing that you put together quickly with whatever’s at hand and start learning from it.
IO is a Mech Suit#
A more general term for Iron Man’s suit is “exoskeleton”, or the more fun-to-say “mech suit”. Described as “a wearable, powered, exoskeleton”, a mech suit gives its wearer protections and extra capabilities, and it’s usually far easier to put a person in a mech suit than to give them the strength or physical and mental training to do a job without one. Often it even helps them do things that would otherwise be impossible.
The Service Mesh is The Matrix, and that’s fine#
Service meshes are for operating at scale, and they put the needs of the many (and the management) ahead of the needs of the few. Sometimes that’s appropriate, especially when we’re running The Matrix. But we should always stay in the wonderland of learning. Sometimes we can take things from heavy industry and use them to make better mech suits, and sometimes we can take things from our mech suits and use them to build better systems.