Platform engineering as a practice is growing in popularity but as with any new idea, confusion abounds. What exactly is a platform and where do the boundaries of responsibility lie? Should a platform be considered as a way for developers to provision the infrastructure they need or should it offer more? Must it be highly opinionated or instead allow teams to make any and all technology choices? Whilst trying to avoid the classic answer of “it depends”, Paula will provide advice on how to consider these key platform engineering questions within the context of your organisation. She will share practices from the many Platform Teams that she has worked with and highlight examples of those highest-performing teams.

Paula is Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Syntasso; her previous roles include Senior Director of Tanzu Global Education at VMware, Senior Director of Platform Services EMEA at Pivotal and Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer of CloudCredo. Working in the IT industry for over 20 years, Paula is passionate about community, diversity and inclusion and has a range of speaking experience including DevOpsDays, DevOps Enterprise Summit, Velocity Conference, QCon and the LeadDev conference. Paula is part of the organising committee for Kubernetes Community Days UK and DevOps Days London, and also organises the London Platform User Group.