The Challenge of scaling digital products

The need for companies to adapt to competition that increasingly demands agility in the face of regulatory changes, pressure for better profit margins, as well as understanding and responding quickly to customer expectations, makes the need for a digital transformation even more urgent.

Generally, IT is not the primary aspect of the digital transformation journey, but it plays an important role for the change to be successful. Accelerating the customer feedback cycle with modern engineering practices and software delivery in production, architecture strategies for modernizing legacy systems, cloud workload cost optimization, security and compliance guarantees are just a few examples of the role of IT in this context.

Within this digital transformation scenario, one of the main challenges for IT is to fulfill technology demands. For example, in a context of several engineering teams, accelerating feedback loops implies dealing with a variety of common requirements across teams. The lack of a cohesive technical strategy when it comes to cross-team, non-functional requirements can extremely elevate the cost of creating and maintaining software, making these very important initiatives unfeasible.

The DevOps Movement: Breaking down organizational silos is not enough

The DevOps movement goes beyond the use of modern tools to operate in the cloud. DevOps addresses a number of principles and cultural changes at the organization level. In practice, it is how a company organizes itself to make deliveries more quickly and efficiently, often giving up or considerably reducing the need for organizational silos.

DevOps principles and practices make a lot of sense within the context of digital transformation. These initiatives begin, precisely, by breaking down the main silos within IT, Operations and Engineering.

This strategy works very well, especially for newly developed initiatives, that is, which still have a reduced number of features that a single engineering team can maintain.

As the software is scaled (mainly in terms of its features), the number of people involved, as well as the complexity of the solution, grows exponentially. In this context, bringing engineering and operations teams together is no longer efficient, for the following reasons:

++++++ Work overload for Cloud Engineers and Architects. Even steadily participating in the day-to-day activities of engineering teams, the number of professionals with these profiles is inversely proportional to the number of engineers who are producing software. Therefore, they become bottlenecks in the delivery of new features as they need to actively participate in key moments while designing new solutions.
+++ Difficulty in innovating through technology. Due to the work overload to support the existing technology stack, introducing new IT solutions can become a risk for the product’s operation, due to the high dependence on people to support it.

++ Cross-team, non-functional requirements. Inevitably, digital solutions appear that grow in size and complexity. Authentication and authorization, CI/CD pipelines, automated software release strategies, observability platform, rolling upgrade of infrastructure components, load and chaos testing execution platform are examples of global functionalities. An organization where all engineering teams must deal with these concerns individually can become prohibitive in terms of cost and efficiency.

Platform Ops: Balancing Agility and Consistency Across Features

Platform Ops is an engineering operation model that supports the best balance between autonomy among engineering teams and best practices for operating cloud-native infrastructure at scale. The purpose of this organizationmodel is to create accelerators for engineering teams, using modern practices of software engineering and automation in a common model, as a platform
The term can be easily associated with teams specialized in deploying and managing Kubernetes, which is also a platform specialized in container orchestration. However, Platform Ops is not limited to container orchestration, but to any and all functionality that speeds up delivery times and adds value to the final product involved and made available as a common and easy-to-consume resource.

Because DevOps deals with a cultural change and the way a company organizes and operates, it is understood that Platform Ops is a way to scale Devops mainly in a context where digital products need to scale through Technology.

ilegra’s PlatformOps Consulting Services.

With years of experience and expertise helping companies from different industries to innovate through technology, ilegra offers a type of consultancy that applies to companies that are beginning to implement a platform model or have already started the journey and need to scale it.

Within this service, the following aspects deserve attention:

+++No prescriptive model of tools or technologies. We understand that the context of our customers is unique. For this reason, we design customized technology strategies with a long-term vision and an adoption plan as the first step of the work.
+++We treat the platform as a digital product, prioritizing the most important features according to their return to the business. We treat the engineering teams as our customers, to understand what their needs are.
+++Platform resources released following the model reducing operational overhead in maintaining and developing technology solutions.
+++Engineering excellence center, comprised of specialist engineers from ilegra monitoring the deliveries of all our platform teams

Looking to generate autonomy and agility for your team? Discover our PlatformOps Consulting Services.