What if you don’t need an army of SREs?

“Platform engineering” tends to bring to mind an army of highly-technical people running around spending their every waking hour carefully tending to the platform. We get this sense that “the platform” is this highly-tuned, finicky, fragile thing just waiting to crash, that needs all these very serious people to keep it running.

Suppose it weren’t like that? Suppose, instead, that we could tie together some open-source projects in a solid, robust way so that they just worked, and once they were working we could trust them to keep working.

Let’s take a look at that world. We’ll start with Linkerd running on k3s: that gives us a rock solid substrate for computation with zero-trust security protecting everything we do and observability and reliability for our entire application. We’ll layer on ArgoCD for progressive deployment and GitOps to bring stability to engineering our application, and we’ll show how to use everything together to build a straightforward, robust, scalable developer environment that doesn’t get in your way… no army required!