Platform Engineering and the Developer Experience - with Rob Hirschfeld, CEO and Founder of RackN

CIO Exchange Podcast

As we’ve known for some time, top developer talent is scarce and continues to see a rise in demand. As a result, tech leaders are increasingly focused on developer productivity and the developer experience, looking for strategies to improve both. One potential solution is platform engineering.

Rob Hirschfeld is the CEO and Founder of RackN, a leader in physical and hybrid DevOps software. He has been in the cloud and infrastructure space for 20 years and has executive experience at both start-ups and big companies. He has a background in Scale Computing, Mechanical and Systems Engineering, and is an advocate for applying lean and agile processes to software delivery.

In this episode, Rob dives into platform engineering, explaining how it can support developers and operations teams, improve productivity and enhance the developer experience. He stresses the importance of collaboration between internal teams and thinking critically about how to define productivity. He also outlines the challenges that he is seeing in automation reliability and automation half-life.
Key Quotes:

“What’s happening is, it's not that hard to write code. It's getting even easier with some of the new things that we have, but it's incredibly hard to take that code on a journey all the way into production and to keep it running in production. And that understanding, learning all those pieces having to do with all the work that has to go into building that infrastructure and making that work, that ends up being a tremendous hurdle for developers.”

“If you're looking at productivity as, I delivered a whole bunch of code. It doesn't make any difference. What you actually need to be doing is delivering the right code at the right time.”

“The way I see platform engineering is, it's a service-oriented operations infrastructure that consolidates the operations experiences across multiple disparate development teams. There's people out there who talk about it being an internal product. If you get too focused on a product definition of platform engineering, you miss what we're really doing, which is creating a service oriented approach. Meaning, it's an operations team that is looking at the developers as customers and figuring out how to better serve those internal teams as a shared resource.”

“What we see everywhere in the industry is there is a reliability crisis in automation. Meaning most people don't believe their automation is very reliable….They’re basing it on, when you run your automation, how often does it work? What we find is that a lot of people have under 80 percent automation success.”

Time stamps:

1:00 Development team’s biggest challenges

2:46 Journey from ideation to production

4:46 Impact of improving the developer experience

11:48 Definition of platform engineering

13:06 Platform engineering case studies

18:51 Why developers and operations teams need to collaborate

24:30 How platform engineering impacts security

27:17 Importance of transparency and stakeholder buy-in

31:59 Automation reliability problems

35:00 Will generative AI improve automation?