Managed Platform, with the Freedom of DIY

The mission of platform engineering is to successfully enable developers by minimizing cognitive load and facilitating a fast flow of software delivery. To achieve this goal efficiently, you need to decide between building your own or buying a platform as a service.

Unfortunately, both options come with their own sets of disadvantages. DIY approaches risk getting stuck in Day 2 Operations, where cost and effort are mostly focused on ongoing maintenance and innovation is neglected in the long run. At the other end of the spectrum, opting for a platform as a service comes with limitations – you don’t have the control and flexibility to tailor the product to your own environments or provide the custom capabilities needed by your developer teams.

To accelerate the delivery of capabilities and increase the quality of the platform, Platform Owners seek smarter ways to move up the stack.

What they usually wish for is:

The ability to build and evolve their platforms quickly and easily in order to support the rapid pace of business innovation.
A strong foundation that provides a standardized setup that ensures consistency across environments, making it easier to deploy and manage the platform.
Full control to be able to fine-tune the platform to their specific environments and use cases, without limitations.
The ability to understand and manage all aspects of the platform to keep the knowledge within the company and reduce the risk of becoming dependent on a third-party vendor (no lock-in)
Security and compliance on all layers of the platform, from the operating system to the applications
A platform that is available immediately, that can instantly provide the needed capabilities to their businesses
Preventive maintenance, lifecycle management, and Day 2 Operations, including 24x7 on-call incident management

The good news is you can get all of the above without having to choose between the constraints of managed services and the burdens of DIY. While both can be expensive and insufficient in the long run, partnering with Giant Swarm provides a smarter and more efficient way to combine the freedom of DIY with the ease of use and convenience of managed services. Giant Swarm is your third and lucky option.

Rapid Adoption

The more developers are using your platform the more successful it is. Gartner states that the number one critical success factor in assessing platform engineering efforts is the platform’s adoption.

Your platform must get “buy-in” from developers by being as attractive as possible. That means it needs to come with easy-to-consume platform capabilities, ensure a smoother developer experience, and enable the rapid flow of software delivery. However, as the number of developers increases, it is also important that your platform can keep up with the growth and scale properly.

Broad scaling requires the platform to be flexible in responding to multiple requirements from various teams with domain-specific needs, different cloud providers, and varying levels of expertise in Cloud Native, without restricting or hindering the development flow. At the same time, central cost management, resource management, security, and governance must be enforced and ensured.

The growing list of responsibilities and requirements can overwhelm platform teams, causing them to lose focus. Prioritizing the most pressing needs becomes difficult and the value that the platform is supposed to deliver to the business risks becoming just an abstract concept.

Once again, Giant Swarm comes to the rescue. We can help you focus on what matters by jointly developing a roadmap that guides you through the multitude of requirements and providing the necessary support to efficiently manage a fleet of clusters for different teams and use cases. We will ensure that the platform doesn’t only get rapid adoption, but that it also grows to meet your needs and prepare your team for sustainable platform evolution.