The Ultimate Cloud Platform Team Topology

GOTO Amsterdam 2024

As teams build with more cloud-native technologies, they aim to work towards a higher rate of flow of features into production, and take responsibility for not only the application code but the infrastructure that starts to be coupled to application logic. Team Topologies has become a popular model for organising teams in these environments. The role of Platform teams to enable other teams to deliver autonomously has evolved rapidly alongside cloud-native approaches like Serverless, changing the way teams collaborate and build.

In this talk we’ll look at the characteristics of highly effective Platform teams, how composable IaC solutions like CDK (Cloud Development Kit) enable Platform teams to adopt a product release cycle and the embedding of guardrails, best practices and sensible defaults. We’ll also look at the role of Hexagonal architecture to enable composable testing patterns for the IaC building blocks and the impact to release cycles.

This talk will take a step back to the organisational approach as well as deep dive on code examples from a platform team building Serverless CDK constructs used by a team of over 150 engineers.