Platform Engineering

What’s Holding Back Your Developers?
Discover the Power of a Unified Platform.

Wherever you are on your platform engineering journey, Callibrity has the skills and experience to meet you where you are, and get you where you want to go.

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What is Platform Engineering?

Complexity in software development has exploded in the last decade. With the mainstream adoption of containerization, cloud based services, infrastructure as code, microservices, and DevOps practices, development teams are being asked to do more and more. The cognitive load on developers has reached a tipping point, resulting in a decline in productivity, and difficulty finding unicorn applicants to fill open roles. The microservice promise of autonomous teams has led to a lack of standardization, an inability to efficiently reuse code, and in some organizations, compliance and security risks.

The solution to this technology sprawl and overburdened developers is Platform Engineering. An internal development platform will allow your development teams to focus on critical business value tasks, instead of being bogged down with operational complexity. However, it is important to maintain the autonomy and ownership for your development teams. This isn’t a return to a ‘throw it over the wall to operations’ mentality. In fact, Platform Engineering empowers developers to use the tools they love more effectively, while also strengthening the relationship between development and operations teams.

The Benefits Our Clients See

Reduced Cost

Reuse of IT assets and less technology sprawl

Increased Velocity

Accelerated delivery with automated processes and reduced dependencies with self service actions

Assured Compliance

Software built on a shared platform makes compliance easy for development teams

Improved Transparency

When all your software runs on the same platform, it becomes much easier to see what is running, how it is performing, and who owns it.

Our Perspective

When evaluating an organization’s current Platform Engineering maturity, Callibrity borrows from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation Platform Engineering Maturity Model. This model acts as a framework we use to establish a baseline, identify areas for improvement, and relentlessly pursue that improvement. The model identifies 5 key aspects of Platform Engineering maturity, as shown below. Callibrity will leverage this model as a starting point for your organization, and routinely refer back to it throughout the development process to ensure we are continuing to make tangible progress.

Each aspect, and the associated question, act as a starting point for analyzing your organization's current level of maturity with Platform Engineering. Click each aspect to learn more!

Investment

How are staff and funds allocated to platform capabilities?

An internal platform won’t be successful unless it has the same level of investment an organization would give an external product. This means more than great engineering, you need a cross functional team that can do user experience, product management, and quality assurance as well. With Callibrity’s holistic suite of offerings in the custom software development space, we are well positioned to help you build a successful platform.

Adoption

Why and how do users discover and use internal platforms and platform capabilities?

If you build it, they will NOT come! A thriving platform requires regular interaction with your users to gain valuable feedback, marketing new features, and allowing community contributions. We ensure that the platform we build aligns with developers' actual needs, rather than just being a shiny solution that checks a box. Callibrity’s product practice helps to support our cross functional teams in driving adoption across your organization.

Interfaces

How do users interact with and consume platform capabilities?

Self-service, self-service, self-service. Callibrity has done a lot of software development, and we know the best thing a platform can do is get out of your way. Every capability of your platform should be available in a self-service, automated fashion. Developers will never have to open a ticket and wait for someone to complete it! We will help you create composable APIs that can be utilized by intuitive front ends, or leveraged by super users to build automation you hadn’t thought of yet.

Operations

How are platforms and their capabilities planned, prioritized, developed, and maintained?

A long lived product team is essential to the success of an internal platform. Callibrity has built countless SaaS applications and intuitively understands what it takes to support a product. From feature support & documentation, to zero downtime deployments and versioned APIs, we have the experience to ensure you aren’t spending 80% of your week playing tech support.

Measurement

What is the process for gathering and incorporating feedback and learning?

How do you know if it’s working if you don’t measure it? You don’t! Callibrity again leans on the cross functional nature of its development teams to ensure there is a strong focus on establishing metrics for success, gathering a baseline, and continuously evaluating progress. This is more than operational excellence, your metrics must also include common usage patterns as well.

Platform engineering is more than just an evolution of DevOps

Platform engineering is an opportunity to accelerate your custom software initiatives through self-service, flexible standardization, and an obsession with developer experience. It’s also the answer to overworked operations and/or DevOps teams that are spending all their time fulfilling tickets, babysitting deployments, and answering questions about pipeline failures.

With our origins as a custom software development firm, Callibrity is uniquely qualified to assess and understand the needs of the development teams within your organization. Whether you aren’t sure where to start, you’ve got a plan and your team needs a little extra juice, or you’ve already started and aren’t seeing the gains you were hoping for, our team of pragmatic experts can help you create a high quality product and realize the potential of your organization.

Our Capabilities

Not every organization will benefit from a holistic platform engineering effort, and not every organization is ready to undertake the effort. Platform Engineering brings many capabilities together under one roof to deliver a developer platform, sometimes you might only need a subset of those capabilities.

Continuous Integration & Delivery Strategies

Whether you need a build pipeline to run tests and do static code analysis, are exploring blue green deployments, or are diving into the world of GitOps - we’ve got you covered.

When the DevOps movement took the industry by storm, Callibrity was an early adopter. We’ve been building pipelines for over a decade, and have a unique perspective that leads to optimizing for a golden ratio between the confidence a pipeline can instill, and the drag it adds to a development team.

Infrastructure as Code

Are you ready to realize the benefits of declarative infrastructure? Terraform? Pulumi? OpenTofu? We do it all!

Leave behind environment drift, manual point and click provisioning processes, and weeks of infrastructure lead time. We’ve led infrastructure as code efforts for many of our clients, helping them establish new patterns and ways of working. Infrastructure as code is more than just a tool, it requires a mental shift that many organizations lean on us to help them navigate.

Cloud Operating Models

How do you leverage the power of the cloud while ensuring costs are controlled and you stay compliant? We’ve got your answers.

Callibrity is an AWS and Microsoft partner and has successfully implemented Cloud Operating models at our small and large clients. Different organizations have different needs, and your cloud operating model should reflect that. In a regulated industry you may favor stricter controls over what your development teams can do, in a fast paced industry where speed matters, you may take a less controlled approach. We can help you evaluate the tradeoffs and choose an approach that’s best for your business.

Containerization & Container Orchestration

Local development environments, container orchestrator selection, kubernetes and its vast ecosystem - Callibrity is experienced with it all.

Containers are our default preference for packaging and running the software we develop, and consequently we’ve become very familiar with the best ways to do just that. We have a deep understanding of the tradeoffs between opinionated managed solutions and a more open platform like Kubernetes. We can help you navigate the ever evolving landscape so you can be confident in your long term strategy.

Observability

You can’t solve problems before they impact your customers if you can’t detect them yourself!

The 3 pillars (metrics, traces, and logs) are essential to understanding how your software is operating, and what impact it is having on your customers. Callibrity is well-versed in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solutions, as well as open source standards like Open Telemetry. We believe that development teams should be responsible for running the software they write in production, and in order to do that effectively they must be armed with as much visibility as possible.

Internal Developer Portals

A great starting point for building your internal platform. We can help with portal selection, identifying use cases, and delivering valuable functionality.

Callibrity has seen organizations leverage internal developer portals as a low barrier to entry, low investment option for exploring the world of platform engineering. An internal developer portal can act as the single pane of glass for all of your developer operations. Callibrity has experience with the leading open source solution, Backstage, as well as a leading SaaS solution, Port.

Ready to Simplify Your Development Process with Platform Engineering?

Callibrity’s proven approach can help your organization realize their potential. Contact us today for a consultation.

What’s Holding Back Your Developers? Discover the Power of a Unified Platform.