42 Experts, One Mission: Advancing Platform Engineering

Platform engineering expertise and experience grows exponentially every day among IT management and developer teams as its adoption continues around the world, but until recently there was no central clearinghouse to amass all that valuable and hard-earned knowledge.

But that changed when a new Platform Engineering Community Ambassador Program was launched last December by the global developer’s community, PlatformEngineering.org, which is bringing together some of the best and brightest minds that are driving innovation and exploration in this still-nascent field.

The Ambassador program aims to connect leading platform engineering experts to discuss best practices and frameworks and to learn from each other, according to the group. It is also seen as an effort that gives these experts public exposure to gain recognition for their work and accomplishments involving platform engineering.

That mission is what caused Cansu Kavili-Örnek, a principal AI consultant in Red Hat’s AI business unit, to get involved in the program, she told The New Stack. “I believe we evolve for the better when we openly share knowledge and experiences, and I see the Ambassador program as a perfect opportunity to contribute to this ecosystem,” she said.

“By being an Ambassador, I get to engage with a community of like-minded professionals, exchange ideas, and help others benefit from platform engineering,” said Kavili-Örnek. “It’s motivating to know that I can play a small part in shaping how teams and organizations adopt practices that make their work more efficient and impactful.”

She said she has seen similar results when sharing platform engineering stories about her experiences in the larger platform engineering community and that those stories seem to resonate with other community members. “When they launched the Ambassador program, it felt like a natural next step,” she said.

Another important attribute of the program is that it welcomes a broad diversity of voices, said Kavili-Örnek. “By learning from different perspectives, the program helps refine the concept of platform engineering and make it more useful and accessible. This way, people and companies who are exploring or already practicing platform engineering can gain better ideas and practical solutions to improve their work.”

How the Ambassador Program Works

So far, 42 experienced platform engineering experts have been enrolled in the Ambassador program and added their expertise to the effort, Sam Barlien, the head of ecosystem for PlatformEngineering.org, told The New Stack. Additional experts are continuing to apply to join the Ambassador Program after providing details about their backgrounds, expertise, accomplishments, activities and training.

“The program’s goal is about sharing knowledge, growing platform engineering, and helping companies by … connecting experts, and putting them in front of others via PlatformCon, other IT events, blogs, and more,” said Barlien. “A big part of it is giving these experts the opportunity to bounce ideas off each other, discuss things, and share – you know, did you try a process or tool? How is it working for you? That is an element of it. That is what an Ambassador Program is about.”

Ambassador Program members can be contacted for more information about their work and experience through their LinkedIn profiles or through PlatformEngineering.org Slack channel.

Ambassadors as Mentors

Another new member of the Ambassador program, Faisal Afzal, a principal technical consultant with cloud consulting and technology services vendor AHEAD, told The New Stack that sharing his platform engineering experiences with others is what attracts him to the program.

“It provides me with an opportunity to mentor and enable the community,” he said. “One of my focuses as an Ambassador is to have conversations on a consistent basis around the discipline of platform engineering, including how it is enabling businesses and improving productivity.”

The growing availability of this expertise today can be transformative for companies, developers and engineers as they work to explore platform engineering, said Afzal.

And having these kinds of helpful and approachable resources would have been personally beneficial back when he was entering the field of platform engineering, he added.

“Access to this thought leadership, evolving artifacts, and more mainstream discussion with like-minded people would have helped me by bringing in best practices and real-world insights and accelerating the journey,” said Afzal. “Instead, it took far longer and was painful at the time.”

But things are continuing to change and it is becoming easier to gain a wealth of useful platform engineering knowledge, he said.

“Cloud native and application modernization efforts often fail when organizations lack a platform engineering discipline to deliver reliable, scalable infrastructure or neglect to treat the platform as a product designed to empower internal developers,” he said. “Without this focus, teams face inefficiencies, fragmented tooling, and poor developer experiences, which hinder innovation and business agility. These challenges motivated me to become a platform engineering Ambassador, driving best practices and enabling organizations to build platforms that truly support their developers and modernization goals.”

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