Proactively Manage Platform Adoption Risks

Creating a managed platform is a powerful strategy – key is to help your clients and proactively manage adoption risks. Risks are everywhere from losing control on infrastructure, release management, upgrades to reduced learning curve and operational supportability. Here are a few strategies to manage adoption risks – these will not only help your clients but help the platform team as well:

• Understand key technical drivers for platform adoption – what do your clients care about the most? Is it faster functional development? ease of deployment? rich tooling? testability? ability to dip into a rich developer ecosystem?
• Provide an integrated console for integrating provisioning, runtime management, and operational support. The key word here is integrated – an integrated toolset that makes it easier for a team to provision a resource, deploy / activate it, elastically scale it , and troubleshoot problems is extremely important.
• Empathize with your client’s adoption challenges: they are losing direct control and access in exchange for a host of powerful platform benefits. But they still need answers to questions like:
  • how rich and useful is the instrumentation (for transparency into transactions or events or requests being handled, for errors / warnings whilst processing, historical metrics / trends)?
  • how do I get access to log messages? are the logs linked to particular request ids or transaction references? how much is the latency between actual processing and log messages reflecting them?
  • can I help myself is something goes wrong during production use? e.g. what if a process or execution takes longer than expected? what if it crashes mid-way? is there support for automatic alerting? how easy or difficult is train my devops team members?
• Provide automated controls to reduce risk when hosting untrusted code. Let’s face it – managed platforms take on a large amount of risk by hosting code that is largely outside it’s control. It is therefore, very critical to reduce defects and address risks via automated controls. You can check for unsupported API calls in your SDK, risky or unsafe libraries being packaged, etc. to address risks while provisioning. This is a vast topic and I will author a follow up post on controls and why they are indispensable to create stable managed platforms