3.8 KiB
Day91 - Team Topologies and Platform Engineering
The text discusses four types of teams in an organization and their interaction with platform engineering, focusing on Team Topologies.
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Workflow Teams: These are responsible for executing work as it comes in, handling exceptions, and ensuring that outputs meet expectations. They can also help to identify opportunities for automation or standardization.
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Platform Teams: These teams create, maintain, and improve the technology platforms and tools that enable other teams to do their jobs effectively and efficiently. Platform teams are responsible for building a robust, reliable infrastructure that can support the organization's needs.
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Conductor Teams (or Enabler Teams): These teams help workflow and platform teams by coordinating activities across the organization, removing obstacles, and ensuring that everyone has the resources they need to do their jobs effectively. They also play a crucial role in driving collaboration and communication between teams.
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Community Teams: These teams support the broader community of practice within the organization, sharing knowledge, best practices, and fostering a culture of learning and continuous improvement.
The text suggests that for an organization to achieve fast flow (efficient, effective work), it's essential to have the right team structures and interactions. It also emphasizes that these structures are not static but evolve over time as the organization matures. The text introduces DDD (Domain-Driven Design) as a toolbox of methodologies to help organizations structure their teams based on logical business and technical domains, influencing the software they develop.
The text briefly mentions the Independent Service Juristic methodology for discovering rough boundaries between teams by considering whether a component or interaction could be offered as a standalone SaaS service. It's important to note that this is just one methodology among many and that organizing for fast flow means constantly adjusting and trending in the right direction, rather than striving for perfection at any given moment.
The text concludes by inviting the audience to reach out if they have further questions and offering workshops and trainings on related topics such as team topologies, creativity, and data engineering. This text discusses the concept of platform teams, which are groups of experts that provide standardized components for other teams to use. These components can include cloud infrastructure, container platforms, virtual machines, networking, storage, load balancing, monitoring, identity and access management, CI/CD, databases, and more.
The key value that these platform teams provide is that they take care of the technical complexity needed to deliver software, allowing other teams to focus on solving business problems. This reduces cognitive load and increases autonomy for those teams.
The text also touches on the concept of "slowification," which involves temporarily slowing down or stopping to sharpen skills and solve a particular problem. This idea is inspired by the book "Wiring the Winning Organization."
Finally, the text discusses how team structures and responsibilities must evolve over time as an organization grows and matures. It mentions the independent service bus methodology for discovering rough boundaries between teams and provides a brief overview of domain-driven design (DDD) as a tool for coping with changing dynamics.
Overall, this text emphasizes the importance of platform teams in reducing technical complexity and increasing autonomy for other teams, while also highlighting the need for organizations to evolve their team structures and responsibilities over time.