GitHub’s platform engineering team shares their approach to tackling infrastructure challenges at scale. Key strategies include:
Understanding your domain:
- Talk to neighboring teams with more experience
- Investigate old issues to understand system limitations
- Read documentation to build foundational knowledge
Platform-specific skills:
- Network fundamentals (TCP, UDP, L4 load balancing, debugging tools)
- Operating systems and hardware selection for scalability and cost
- Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible, Consul)
- Distributed systems understanding (failures are inevitable, need failover/recovery)
Impact radius considerations:
- Understand downstream dependencies before making changes
- Review postmortems to understand incident impact
- Use monitoring and telemetry (like Single Availability Metric) for quick health checks
Testing in distributed environments:
- Use test sites as “real” machines for changes
- Test IaC provisioning and deprovisioning operations
- Implement end-to-end testing by directing traffic to test servers
- Test self-healing capabilities and identify bottlenecks early
- Roll out changes host-by-host for easier rollback
The key difference with platform engineering is the wide impact radius - changes to foundational services like DNS can affect numerous products. Testing and gradual rollouts are critical.
For the full article with detailed examples and best practices, see the original post.