As a platform engineer, I enjoy the benefits of working in a field with a vibrant ecosystem of open source infrastructure and developer tools. I've spent much of the last decade building developer platforms by curating and assembling these tools, and after a number of iterations, I seem to have hit on something that's working really well for my current company (SimpliSafe).

As our platform's adoption has grown, we've gotten more and more frequent, really positive, heartwarming feedback from our developers who really like it. This is absolutely freaking delightful, and honestly never stops surprising me.

I often get asked by our developers if we should consider open-sourcing the platform. I've spent some cycles entertaining the idea, but I usually don't get very far before it seems unworkable.

This post is an experiment in thinking in public; I'd like to brain dump my thoughts on the challenges of building an open-source developer PaaS, in the hopes that the platform engineering community might provide some insight to get me past this block.

My current company is struggling with some challenges that are pretty typical for a wildly successful startup that's rapidly grown into a medium-sized company. We've got the expected technical debt, organizational design challenges, and a seemingly infinite number of small systems that work great... until they catch fire as we hit new scaling thresholds.

A commonly accepted notion in software engineering leadership is that managers have a much bigger potential for impact on a business than an individual contributor. This is certainly a credible argument, given that a great manager can have a huge impact through building a great team. They're responsible for recruiting the right people, steering the culture, and making the biggest decisions about what risks to take, what opportunities to pursue, etc. Ultimately, they're accountable for what the team delivers.

Over the past 15 years, I've been working on one form or another of internal developer platform. Even long before, while working at small startups, I inevitably ended up building (or curating) some little web framework, a build system, and slapping together scripts to package and deploy our stuff reliably. No one ever told me to do this, it was just obviously necessary.

In these cases, I was building a product for myself and my immediate team members, so it was a pretty tight feedback loop with the customer. I'd put a little extra effort to make things nice for other developers on my team, and also out of a bit of pride in making something that felt elegant.

At work, we're in the process of rebuilding our metrics pipeline, as we've outgrown our old self-managed TIG (Telegraf, InfluxDB, Grafana) solution. We've had this solution in place for many years, and it's served us well. Especially given the increasingly predatory pricing models of observability vendors, it's been extraordinarily cost-effective.

But over the last couple years, as we've grown, we've started to hit the limits of what we can handle with a single, vertically scaled instance of InfluxDB (especially using InfluxDB v1). It was increasingly stressful to keep it running smoothly, and we had to be very vigilant about cardinality, as it's very easy to accidentally introduce a cardinality explosion that can bring down the entire database.

As part of an evaluation of Prometheus compatible monitoring solutions, I found the need to push our use of the OTEL Collector to handle some use cases like creating metrics allowlists, renaming metrics, or adding and modifying labels.

Here's some examples, based on what I learned, of the crazy and powerful things you can do with OTEL collector processors to manipulate metrics.

It was 2004, and I had a huge chip on my shoulder.

For most of my career, I've found that I tend to quickly develop a reputation in whatever company I'm working at. I've never been the best programmer, but I've got some breadth, creativity, and critical thinking skills, and I'm good at synthesis and communication. This has helped me see the big picture in moments where a novel idea was needed, and I was able to connect some talented people to come up with some cool stuff together.

I've been reflecting recently on a really formative period in my career, when I had a chance to be part of a massive experiment in progressive engineering management.

About 3 and a half years before I left Vistaprint, I was asked to join the Engineering leadership team by our (relatively) new VP of Engineering, Erin DeCesare (who is now the CTO of EZCater). She was a particularly bold leader in terms of her progressive management ideas, and was rapidly reshaping the organization with a strong set of values around empowerment and servant leadership.

When learning a new recipe, especially when dabbling in cuisine from different cultures, I find it really important to make sure one is really precise in their understanding the words used in the recipe. I've had a few unfortunate misunderstandings that resulted in... gastronomic disaster.

Similarly, I find that I can't responsibly use the word "DevOps" without testing that the person I'm talking to know which meaning I'm using. Here's some examples of what someone may think I mean when I say "DevOps":