DevOps is about creating a culture of shared responsibility in delivery teams. It is recommended to embed operations skills into delivery teams to reduce friction and enable them to deliver products to customers faster but whenever there is a need for significant investment in tooling and automation and teams lack the skills to self-manage a full application and operations stack, having a separate Platform engineering team can help. Organizations that consider establishing such a platform engineering team should be very cautious not to accidentally create a separate DevOps team.

In this presentation Adarsh Shah will talk about when and why Platform engineering team can be helpful. The team’s chief responsibility is to operate a platform which enables delivery teams to self-service deploy and operate systems with reduced lead time and complexity. The emphasis here is on self-service infrastructure and supporting tools, with delivery teams still responsible for supporting what they deploy onto the platform. He will also talk about challenges and lessons learned leading and being part of such teams. He will explain “The Three Ways: The Principles Underpinning DevOps” as mentioned in “DevOps Handbook” & “The Phoenix Project” and how it can be used to resolve some of these challenges faced by the team.

Adarsh Shah works at Contino as Principal Consultant. Prior to Contino he was with ThoughtWorks where he lead various teams including application development and platform engineering teams. He has a