Abel Navarro
Abel Navarro is a Senior Engineering Manager working in Platform Engineering. During the last 25 years he has worked across infrastructure, cloud platforms, observability, databases, networking and developer experience in companies ranging from startups to large international organizations.
His current focus is helping platform teams operate as internal products, reducing cognitive load for engineers and improving the flow of value across the organization. Abel is particularly interested in the intersection between technology, organizational design and platform adoption.
Session
Platform Engineering is often presented as a problem of tooling: self-service platforms, golden paths, developer portals and automation. Those capabilities are important, but in my experience they are rarely the limiting factor.
At Cabify we found that most platform initiatives had a reasonable justification behind them. Reliability improvements, developer experience, compliance requirements, cost optimization and new capabilities all created value. The challenge was not deciding what was worth doing, but deciding what was worth doing first.
This talk shares lessons learned from running infrastructure and platform teams where the number of worthwhile opportunities consistently exceeded available capacity, and how that changed our approach and processes to Platform Engineering.