Day Two Cloud 199: Platform Engineering With Suzanne Daniels

Welcome to this episode of Day Two Cloud! Today, we’ll be diving into the world of platform engineering and internal developer portals. Our special guest, Suzanne Daniels, Developer Relations Lead at Port, will be sharing her insights on how platform engineering can take your DevOps journey to the next level. With platform engineering, you can treat technology as a product and developers as customers, resulting in a more efficient and effective workflow. Suzanne will also be discussing the benefits of having an internal developer portal, which is a self-service platform that allows developers to access API documentation, find other projects, and even spin up a dev environment. You’ll learn about the importance of involving various groups in the design process and the decision of whether to build or buy an internal developer portal. If you’re interested in seeing demos, Suzanne recommends checking out getport.io and backstage.io. Links Suzanne Daniels on Twitter Suzanne Daniels on LinkedIn The DevOps Toolkit (YouTube Channel) How To Create A Complete Internal Developer Platform (IDP)? (via DevOps Toolkit on YouTube) Port Backstage Transcription Transcriptions are provided via an automated service, so they aren’t perfect. You’ve been warned. Ned Bellavance (00:00:01) – Welcome to day two Cloud. Today we’re talking about platform engineering and internal developer portals. And what are they, what are they good for? Why should you adopt one immediately at your organization? What jumped out to you, Ethan? Well, Ethan Banks (00:00:17) – I don’t know that you’re gonna be, uh, adopting one immediately within your organization. Cause there’s a lot to it. It’s a big serious undertaking. But the thing that caught me is, Suzanne described platform engineering as an evolution of DevOps or something along those lines. Like if you’re a DevOps intensive organization, platform engineering might be where you go next, the next stage of your maturation of the platforms that you’re offering to your developer community. That captivated me, Ned. It really did. Ned Bellavance (00:00:46) – Yes. And the person guiding us, like you said, is Suzanne Daniels. She’s the developer relations lead over at Port. You can visit that port, get port.io. So enjoy this episode with Suzanne Daniels. Well, Suzanne Daniels, welcome to the podcast. Can you tell the audience a little bit about yourself and what brought you to your current role at Port? Suzanne Daniels (00:01:10) – Yeah, so hi folks. Uh, I am Suzanne Nathans. Um, I work at Port, uh, as a developer relations lead, and I’m a Microsoft M V P in developer Technologies. Um, I ended up there, uh, after working for a large cloud provider, um, working in, in DevOps, in, in consultancy roles as an engineering manager as well for many, many years. Um, and I think that explains a little bit, um, the passion, uh, of why I joined Port, why I focus my career nowadays on improving developer experience, um, in, uh, yeah. And, and Port is a great place to, to be at, to develop an internal developer portal. Ned Bellavance (00:01:55) – Got you. Okay. So you, you’ve been down in the trenches. You’ve seen what developers and ops folks actually need and what they care about. And would you say that you’re now expressing that for them in your current role? Suzanne Daniels (00:02:08) – I’m not only expressing, I’m, I’m trying to also influence the direction in which we are going with the whole, uh,