# Building a Platform Engineering Organization So, you want to build a Platform Engineering Organization. Possible with a size of one team. That is great! There is much potential for you to create value and awesomeness. I do also believe there are many challenges, and here I do the thought experiment of, how would I go about it if I wanted to build a platform engineering org. In the following I am going to make two ridiculously large assumptions. First, you already have management buy-in for the platform enginering mindset. How to establish this buy-in is a completely different topic for either someone else or somewhen else. Second, I assume - and this is a tough one. That you have buy-in at a high enough level that both the platform building and it's users are in the same sub-tree. ![[Pasted image 20220531110515.png]] This is necessary as there are the following costs to the dev teams during establishment of a platform engineering organization. - **Loss of productivity**: Short term, it will almost always be more efficient to keep doing what you are already doing. - **Migration Effort**: Migrating to the new platform, will be an on-going burden on the dev teams. If this is not prioritized, it will lead to slow adoption of the platform as well as ongoing maintenance of two systems. - **Increased cognitive load:** Until the teams are fully working on the new platform, and thus have decommisioned everything working the old way, they not only have to learn a new way of working with accompanying tool stack, they also have to make room in the brain for two different modes and models. Note, that these costs are besides the direct investments in the platform org itself. Engineers, managers, hardware, coffee, you know. This combines to ensure that if we do not have buy-in and faith at a high level in the org, we are bound to struggle. # Notes Honor buyin What are themes that could be worked on in a platform org - Observability - Alerting - Orchestration - Deployment - Dev Environment - Compliance - InfoSec - Developer Infrastructure up front what are the problems that we are trying to solve, what are the problems that we are not trying to solve. Whose problems are we trying to solve. What is our strategy for those problems that we are not setting out to solve. Build vs. buy