At AWS Summit London, one theme came up again and again across organisations of every size and sector: platform teams are getting much clearer about what they should build, and what they shouldn’t. From highly regulated financial institutions to global travel platforms, the most effective teams aren’t trying to recreate cloud services. They are deliberately offloading undifferentiated work to providers like AWS, and focusing their effort on the parts of the platform that actually create...

Organisations demand capabilities that are operable and scalable across a range of disparate platform technologies. The architectural patterns that achieve this are not unique to a single organisation, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool, or user interface choice. What platform teams need is a clearer model for what a scalable capability looks like so that every new capability does not become another special case to integrate, govern, and operate. That is the purpose of Platform Capability...

The relatively recent move towards more centralised platforms stems from a desire to exert greater control following an era of sprawl introduced by DevOps. Yet on reflection, using the word “control” is likely not only unnecessary but also wrong. In the end, control is one solution that can be applied towards the cost and risk reduction outcome organisations are most concerned with, which can be better summarised as coherence.