The platform group - When do you need one?
Asking for a friend - A serious question; after a jab.
Every Kubernetes ecosystem company I talk to has an organization’s platform group in its sales pipeline. The group is going to buy the tooling to make CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and cloud templating take off within a company.
In practice, I’ve found the practice of the platform group to be as consistent as the practice of DevOps. In other words, the customers I talk to are all over the place. I see platform groups ranging from a centralized organization that pays the AWS bill to as complex as the team building and managing the CI/CD pipeline between all an organization's silos.
The concept of the platform group is nascent. So, I’m asking the question, when do you know it’s time to form a platform group?
The AWS bill becomes unwieldy.
You’ve adopted Kubernetes or some other application platform and need a team to manage it.
Do you desire an automated CI/CD Pipeline?
Other
What has been the catalyst for birthing your Platform team?
For organizations with sensitive data needs and legacy apps, I think it makes some sense to look at bringing cloud to on-premises rather than the inverse through taking on solutions that work both cloud and on-premise. I'm a bit biased as an ex Microsoftie (mainly not because I think MS stuff is all wonderful, but because I'm more comfortable with it). Where I'm working in DoD with high security requirements, we've had good sucess with Microsoft Azure DevOps which provides an on-premises version. I like also Azure Stack Hub which is a sort of cloud in a box, but the problem is that the SDK is only a subset of functionality, so just to evaluate it, you're looking at upwards of 300K to get an appliance just for evaluating it. I'm not super-knowledgeable with Red Hat, but my understanding is that you can do a lot on premises with OpenShift without having to commit to commercial cloud.
We did it when we first adopt cloud foundry….needed a group to make that thing work within our high compliance environment.