Developer Control Planes: A Platform Architect's Point of View

The concept of "shifting left" at scale in a fully cloud-native organization may sound futuristic to those just entering the cloud-native space. For cloud-native leaders, who have run Kubernetes in production for years, shifting left is well underway. Lunar, a startup challenger bank in the Nordics, is one such organization.

The discussion surfaced several key themes:

• Always be educating: Underpinning all of these shifts is the need for developer ups-killing. Organizations at the leading edge of cloud-native innovation need to be prepared to support hands-on developer education at all levels via documentation, self-service recordings, and in-person/virtual training.
• ‍Rapid onboarding is a competitive advantage: At Lunar, onboarding provides a service catalog that provides references to different libraries, and different variations on how to create a service, with examples of how other teams have created similar things. Lunar uses Backstage to help with fast-paced engineer onboarding. It has enabled clear visibility into what services exist and what they do, which benefits not only developers new to the company, but the company as a whole.
• ‍Defining a "paved-path" platform reduces tool sprawl: At Lunar there isn't a mandate to use specific technologies, but providing an opinionated "paved path" take on tooling and centralizing tools has accelerated developer ramp-up and productivity. In part, defining the path streamlines ramp-up for developers, but it also helps the platform team in combating tool sprawl.
• ‍Creating opinionated workflows supports a good developer experience: Lunar has created Shuttle, a CLI for handling shared build and deploy tools between many projects no matter what technologies the project is using. The Lunar platform team also adopted developer-friendly GitOps workflows (using Flux and a custom release manager) very early on in their cloud-adoption journey.
• ‍Enabling developer ownership is key to speed and safety: The "you build it, you run it" mantra isn't just theoretical. Organizations like Lunar operate this way every day. The expectation is that developers own the full software life cycle, but to empower them to do so, it has to be manageable. Platform teams need to lay the groundwork for shifting left and make it easy for developers to code, ship, and run. If done correctly, this should help organizations realize the speed benefits of cloud-native development and get fast feedback loops without any downside.