Last week Deloitte Platform Engineering launched a new Platform Engineers meetup in Melbourne. #PEtechtalk is for engineers, by engineers. It was my privilege to be one of the speakers on the night presenting Deloitte’s OpenDATA platform, alongside Nicholas Faiz from News Corp presenting “TCOG, from Monolith to SOA”. In this post I want to share my presentation and explain what makes the Platform Engineers meetup unique.
Over the past year my colleagues and I have been building Deloitte’s OpenDATA Platform on AWS. This is a platform built on Kubernetes and aimed at any organisation wanting to accelerate the launch of new cloud-based digital capabilities centred around Open Data.
Working with a client based in Europe gave us the opportunity to deploy to AWS, leveraging some of their latest services which were unavailable in the Australian (Sydney) region at the time. AWS SSO and the new Client VPN were among these new services, but most importantly has been our use of EKS, AWS’ managed Kubernetes offering. Having now run EKS in production for several months, we’ve learned a lot about how best to configure it for multitenancy and perform routine maintenance on the clusters. We’ve written some great automation scripts to upgrade our Kubernetes worker nodes as part of a CI/CD pipeline, and also automating the provisioning and rollout of internal SSL certificates in the cluster. These are classic Day 2 operational problems of any modern platform and we’ve come up with some unique solutions to solve them.
These were just some of the points I got to discuss in my talk. It was fantastic to present to an audience of peers across a range of industries, but also an engaged audience full of questions both during and after the session.
Why a Platform Engineers meetup?
In Platform Engineering we often get a chance to work with new and exciting technology, and we want to share the lessons of our experiences with the wider community. Building robust, scalable and secure platforms is not an easy task. With the rapid pace of change in cloud environments, it is impossible to stay on top of every development and best practise, solely as individuals.
That is why the Platform Engineers meetup is important – to bring together platform engineers to show off the great things we’re building in a community of like-minded individuals. Generalising the lessons we learn and sharing them makes us all better engineers.
The Platform Engineers meetup #PEtechtalk is a relaunch of the Microservices meetup that was originally founded by Sixtree in 2013. In 2019, now as Deloitte Platform Engineering, we recognise that microservices are just a part of modern systems architecture and have changed the name of the meetup to Platform Engineers.
If you are interested in any and all aspects of building modern, scalable, reliable IT platforms, come along and get involved. If you have something cool to show off that you’ve been working on, please get in contact to present.
Finally, if either you missed out on attending, or you attended and wanted to find out a bit more, here are the slide decks from the night:
Reach out to me with any questions and see you around.
Join us for monthly #PEtechtalk
- Melbourne: https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/Melbourne-PE/
- Sydney: https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/Sydney-PE/
