At QCon London, Aviran Mordo, VP of Engineering at Wix, shared that developing a Platform as a Runtime (PaaR) solution is a substantial undertaking best suited for organizations facing significant scaling challenges.
If your microservice environment is relatively small, with fewer than 100 services, alternative, more cost-effective solutions for scaling might be preferable. You can start by enforcing standard libraries, maintaining rigid control over third-party dependencies, and building rules to enforce standards.
The Wix team built a "generally available" (GA) enforcer that would force everyone to deploy their artifacts to production with the latest libraries and frameworks at least once every two weeks.
An important lesson the Wix team learned is that they needed the platform team to be in the right mindset. They had to have a Value-Driven platform team. While this can be its own topic, a pivotal discovery was made: the most crucial KPI for the platform team is "developer adoption."
If developers aren’t using your platform, it might not be delivering real or enough value. This kind of thinking was critical to the team. Collaborating with product developers is very helpful in adopting the platform since product developers are always involved in defining the platform features and capabilities and setting requirements that solve their real problems.
The path to achieving these goals was not easy. Aside from the technological challenges, there is also the human factor. Developers can be apprehensive of abstractions and unseen functionalities. To win the hearts and minds of developers, consistent communication about progress and ongoing education regarding the platform’s inner workings are vital. This transparency demystifies the "magic" and empowers developers to debug and contribute effectively.
This content is an excerpt from a recent InfoQ article by Aviran Mordo, "Platform as a Runtime - the Next Step in Platform Engineering."
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