How Thoughtworks Bridges the Platform Engineering Gap
Platform engineering began as a movement among systems administrators for better tools and development processes, but they are no longer the only ones interested in its value. Since it appeared in the development world, platform engineering is now even a topic being raised by more corporate executives as they are looking into how investing in it can bring big benefits to their companies.
And to do this, many executives are reaching out to their established relationships with third-party expertise — in the form of trusted IT consultants — to get further insights and advice so they can make their own platform engineering decisions.
This is how many enterprises get involved with Thoughtworks, a U.K.-based global technology consultancy that has been advising clients on enterprise modernization, platform engineering and cloud for several years as the technology has been maturing and spreading in usage.
“Most organizations of a certain scale have some awareness of how platform engineering is going to drive value,” Thomas Squeo, Thoughtworks’ chief technology officer for the Americas, told The New Stack. “That is one of the things that happen — we will get into a conversation where we will help fill in the professional development needs of that organization, so they understand the art of the possible.”
For Executive Buy-In, Execs Must Understand Platform Engineering
Talking with company executives and getting their buy-in on technology initiatives and spending has always been a critical and sometimes challenging task for IT admins, managers, developers and others, and that is certainly the case when it comes to still-emerging platform engineering projects. These candid conversations are at the core of Thoughtworks’ consulting business today, said Squeo.
“If you think about the altitudes in an organization, the senior leadership is going to have a very different view of what those outcomes are than, say, a team that is going to be consuming it, right?” he said. “If you think about that product mindset, what happens is that those teams need to be able to understand and get information at their relative levels. So, a developer learns from other developers. A director is going to learn from other directors. So, you may want to contextualize it at each scale.”
An important focus of Squeo’s job is talking with senior executives at client companies who are shaping the outcomes for their organizations from startups to enterprises of all sizes and public sector institutions. In recent years, these conversations have grown to include broad discussions of platform engineering and how it is making its way firmly into the consciousness of executives, bringing interest in this powerful development tool to the CEO, the CTO and other top-level leaders.
Those discussions are different for every company, said Squeo.
“We do not come in with a pre-baked solution and say, ‘Hey, we are going to just work with you in this way,’ because what ends up happening is each [enterprise] is unique,” said Squeo. “And while there are commonalities in the problem set that is being solved” so many things are different between companies, including their organizational designs, operational models, levels of technical capability and maturity, whether that they own their own data centers, and whether they have commitments with certain cloud providers, he said. “Each one of those are part of that dimensionality that we need to consider as we engage these customers.”
At the same time, Thoughtworks consultants do share their opinions on the subject as they work with their business clients, he said. “We have seen enough patterns to be able to look at how organizations might be able to get to success faster.”
To help corporate executives and leaders plan their platform engineering investments, Thoughtworks brings in its consultants to work with people at multiple levels, according to Squeo. “For example, if you are thinking about the altitudes inside an organization, I would usually be paired with the senior leadership. We would then have strategists that are paired with their executive teams, and then our practitioners are going to be paired with their teams on the ground doing that work.”
For a typical client engagement, “it ends up being an enablement architecture that is aligned to the right altitude in the organization to be able to drive that value, as opposed to just working with one slice,” said Squeo. “We find that if you work with only one slice, the top down, decisions are resisted. If you worked at the bottom, the performance, impact and exposure of those things is key. And so, it ends up becoming kind of an organizational change management opportunity as well. We would consider platform engineering as kind of the ultimate atmosphere for product thinking for an engineering organization, because this living organism of this engineering platform needs to … do what developers need.”
How Clients Work With Thoughtworks on Platform Engineering Strategies
Some business clients approach Thoughtworks knowing they want to bring in platform engineering, while other clients know they have technology problems but do not know how to tackle them, said Squeo.
“We find ourselves in many different conversations that platform engineering might be the solution,” he said. “It is a way in which we have been able to deliver a lot of value for our customers. But early in the journey, a startup or a scale-up might not be at the position where they can start to abstract those things away and deliver that value.”
Again, different clients can have very different requirements and directions when it comes to platform engineering, he said. “I would say that any company of a certain scale and a certain portfolio complexity can benefit from a platform engineering approach. To some organizations, the platform engineering journey is going to be, ‘Hey, I want to do this one thing and make it available to everybody.’ And in other cases, they might go and say, ‘Hey, I am going to have a control plane’ where they are going to take advantage of multiple services back on the engineering platform.”
Ultimately, the strategy will depend, said Squeo.
Companies with more than 50 engineers likely have experienced situations where DevOps practices start to erode the overall throughput that is available due to duplicative systems, duplicative practices and related problems, he said. For some clients, they might need to build or buy an internal developer portal where developers can essentially have the standards, practices, themes, templates and knowledge base to do their work, said Squeo.
For other clients, “they will come to us on product development, and then they will identify a capability or a scaling opportunity to where you can start to abstract services to an engineering platform and be able to drive scale,” he said. “In some cases, they might have had an initiative that has not delivered the business value that they identified in their business cases, and we will come in and support them there.”
And then in other cases, clients just may want to be nimbler in how they are approaching their operations, he added.
“When you think about platform engineering, it is a living journey for any organization,” said Squeo. “The most important thing is, it is not just ‘bring the technology in and then they will come.’ It has to be maintained over time.”
The evolution that companies can experience by considering and engaging platform engineering can be groundbreaking, he added.
“It is not uncommon to see engineering teams go from a lower level of capability to a higher level of capability, and they will actually evolve out of that architectural pattern into a new one that will drive the next generation of an engineering platform going forward,” said Squeo. “Our ultimate success is when we see ongoing, iterative improvement of the [evolution] of an organization.”
Consultants Provide Independent Opinions and Advice to Executives
Other platform engineering consultants that work with companies to help them with their platform engineering plans and strategies include consultants like Improving (which recently acquired a competitor, InfraCloud Technologies), Stackgenie, CloudRaft, Xebia, Maven Solutions, IBM and Accenture. Corporate executives like working with consultants so they can be sure to hear independent points of view about technologies and vendors, instead of just hearing marketing pitches from vendors that are trying to sell their platform engineering products and services.
For IT executives, having consultants expands their knowledge and decision-making resources, while also providing opinions from experts whom they trust and have perhaps worked with for years.
Offering Platform Engineering Options to Clients
Thoughtworks works with clients to advise and guide them on whether to build a platform engineering platform on their own, to buy one from a vendor in the marketplace, or to use a hybrid combination of self-built and off-the-shelf products, said Squeo. Thoughtworks works closely with several platform engineering vendors, including Humanitec, Mia-Platform and Kratix. Sometimes, Thoughtworks helps its clients use an off-the-shelf platform as a technology accelerator to assist a client working to build platform engineering into their operations.
“Because what ultimately happens is that it needs to be viable, it needs to be desirable, and it needs to be scalable,” said Squeo. “One of the things I always think about from a platform engineering standpoint is what capabilities do you want to abstract away from the engineering teams so they can go faster, so they can look at it more like tools they can take out.”
“My analogy is usually that of a professional kitchen,” he added. “You know, there are things that the professional kitchen might want to make on their own — their own butter, their own spices, and so on. But there is just as much an opportunity to go and say, ‘Hey, this is something I am going to take off the shelf and have it ready for my team.’”
How Long Does a Consultancy Relationship Take To Achieve Results?
For clients, working with a consultancy on building a platform engineering project will take at least one quarter before they see any early results, said Squeo. “It is usually between sprints four and six when we start to see that value start to appear. By then, the teams are starting to understand it because it is an enablement problem as much as it is an engineering problem. We could put the engineers in very quickly, but it is [also] a socio-technology problem, where the people processes, the ways of working, are as important as the underpinning technology.”
What About Managed Services for Platform Engineering?
So far, though, for enterprises moving into platform engineering, these projects are initiatives that they have to operate on their own once they are built, said Squeo. Today in the world of IT services, there are no managed service providers that are providing platform engineering managed services to businesses that want to take this path, he said. While Thoughtworks provides consulting and assistance in building such tools, the consultancy does not provide ongoing managed services to run platform engineering efforts.
“They are typically maintained inside their organizations,” said Squeo. “We might have team members that are there and part of their team on a long-running basis. But we definitely do not manage this as a managed service.”
Eventually, managed services could come to the platform engineering market if the demand and service providers are there, he added.
“I would say that we are too early for that now because it is so deeply coupled to the [internal development operations and infrastructure of an] enterprise,” said Squeo. “I think that there might be opportunities in the future, but I would say that a [platform engineering vendor] like Humanitec or Mia-Platform are going to be the most likely ones to be able to provide something along those lines.”
