r/platform_engineering

Had 2 really shit platform engineering jobs -- the really shit was a combination of hostile teams, personal issues and not recovering from stress. I barely learned anything and feel incredibly low on tech in general. Before this I was a python software engineer where I did mostly simple stuff but I enjoyed it quite a bit. Getting back into the job market and just terrified.

I qualify for way more on paper than I do in person (genuinely, I barely worked at my platform jobs) and don't know how to deal with this, any tips?

Let’s be honest, the tech we use today is amazing, but it can also be complex.

It’s only natural that teams want to build platforms that hide this complexity to improve productivity, avoid mistakes, and reduce cognitive load. But they may be misled to believe that the more complexity they hide, the better their platform is. Instead, they end up creating dangerous illusions!

This talk reflects on two decades of building complex distributed systems, highlighting where abstractions helped and where illusions led to major disappointments.

Finding risks is usually not the hard part anymore.

The harder questions are:

- Is this actually important?

- Who owns it?

- What application does it affect?

- Is there evidence for the control?

- What should we fix first?

- What can AI safely help with?

I’m hosting an AMA with Josh from IBM Concert to talk about how teams move from findings to action across application risk, compliance, resilience, and remediation.

We can also get into how Concert helps with things like application context, compliance controls, evidence assessment, vulnerability prioritization, remediation planning, integrations, and AI-assisted workflows.

Drop your questions below.

Hi guys,

Recently stumbled across a job advert for a senior Linux infrastructure engineer (systems and platform) for a company in Mayfair, London.

https://www.quant-capital.co.uk/jobs/senior-linux-infrastructure-engineer-systems-platform/

Was shocked at the advertised range, and the job spec seemed pretty brief but ordinary for an SRE/Devops oriented infra engineer.

I just wondered if anyone here has experience in a role very similar to this in the financial sector, could maybe talk a bit with me about what a day in the life looks like? Common issues they deal with and whether it’s actually enjoyable work so I can decide if this is a path I want to continue working towards or if this is back to back burnout kind of role?

For reference I’m currently an infrastructure engineer in the north of the UK earning less than half the bottom range of this role being advertised - but I’ve only ever worked in MSP/CSP/ISP environments.

Any insight would be appreciated, this has really got me considering my career path choices…

I built a small tool to catch infra risks before production releases
I’ve been working on a project called Beacon.
The idea came from a very practical problem I’ve seen in distributed systems: before a release, teams usually have dashboards, logs, Terraform files, Kafka configs, Kubernetes manifests, runtime snapshots, etc. But still, the actual question is usually very simple:
“Is this system safe enough to release to production?”
Beacon tries to answer that.
It scans infrastructure/config/runtime inputs and gives a production-readiness decision with ranked risks, possible root causes, and suggested next actions. Right now it has examples around Kafka, Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm, runtime snapshots, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Schema Registry, CI/CD, and flow degradation.
This is not meant to replace observability tools. The way I think about it is:
Observability tells you what is happening.
Beacon tries to tell you what is risky, why it matters, and what should be fixed first.
You can try the demo without setting up Python locally.
Run the UI with Docker:

docker pull ghcr.io/mishraricha1806/beacon:latest

docker run --rm -p 8765:8765 ghcr.io/mishraricha1806/beacon:latest ui --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8765

Then open:

http://127.0.0.1:8765/

For the simplest demo, use the sample bad infrastructure example from the repo:

examples/bad-infra/

In the UI, choose the static/readiness input, upload the files from that folder, run the scan, and check the readiness score, top reasons, grouped risks, and next actions.
You can also run the same demo from CLI:

docker run --rm \
  -v "$PWD:/workspace/project:ro" \
  ghcr.io/mishraricha1806/beacon:latest readiness static \
  /workspace/project/examples/bad-infra \
  --environment prod \
  --no-html \
  --no-open-report

Expected result is the tool should flag the setup as NOT READY, with risks like replication, storage/message-size, and missing governance context.
There is also a Black Friday style demo for payment/event pipeline readiness:

docker run --rm \
  -v "$PWD:/workspace/project:ro" \
  ghcr.io/mishraricha1806/beacon:latest readiness all \
  --static-path /workspace/project/examples/demo-black-friday \
  --snapshot /workspace/project/examples/demo-black-friday/runtime-snapshot.yaml \
  --environment prod \
  --no-html \
  --no-open-report

Repo: https://github.com/mishraricha1806/beacon
I’d be interested in feedback from people who work with Kafka, Kubernetes, Terraform, platform engineering, SRE, or release governance.
Mainly looking for thoughts on:

• Does this kind of readiness gate feel useful before production releases?
• What signals would you expect such a tool to check?
• Would you prefer this as a CLI, CI/CD gate, or lightweight UI?

GitHub

GitHub - mishraricha1806/beacon: Detect infrastructure risks before production.