#96 - Keeping Platforms Simple and Fast with Joachim Hill-Grannec

This episode with Joachim Hill-Grannec asks: How do platforms bloat, and how do you keep them simple and fast with trunk-based dev and small batches? Which metrics prove it works—cycle time, uptime, or developer experience? Can security act as a partner that speeds delivery instead of a gate?   We are always happy to answer any questions, hear suggestions for new episodes, or hear from you, our listeners. DevSecOps Talks podcast LinkedIn page DevSecOps Talks podcast website DevSecOps Talks podcast YouTube channel Summary In this episode of DevSecOps Talks, Mattias speaks with Joachim Hill-Grannec, co-founder of Peltek, a boutique consulting firm specializing in high-availability, cloud-native infrastructure. Following up on a previous episode where Steve discussed cleaning up bloated platforms, Mattias and Joachim dig into why platforms get bloated in the first place and how platform teams should think when building from scratch. Their conversation spans cloud provider preferences, the primacy of cycle time, the danger of adding process in response to failure, and a strong argument for treating security and quality as enablers rather than gatekeepers. Key Topics Platform Teams Should Serve Delivery Teams Joachim frames the core question of platform engineering around who the platform is actually for. His answer is clear: the delivery teams are the client. Platform engineers should focus on making it easier for developers to ship products, not on making their own work more convenient. He connects this directly to platform bloat. In his experience, many platforms grow uncontrollably because platform engineers keep adding tools that help the platform team itself: "Look, I spent this week to make my job this much faster." But Joachim pushes back on this instinct — the platform team is an amplifier for the organization, and every addition should be evaluated by whether it helps a product get to production faster and gives developers better visibility into what they are working on. Choosing a Cloud Provider: Preferences vs. Reality The conversation briefly explores cloud provider choices. Joachim says GCP is his personal favorite from a developer perspective because of cleaner APIs and faster response times, though he acknowledges Google's tendency to discontinue services unexpectedly. He describes AWS as the market workhorse — mature, solid, and widely adopted, comparing it to "the Java of the land." Azure gets the coldest reception; both acknowledge it has improved over time, but Joachim says he still struggles whenever he is forced to use it. They observe that cloud choices are frequently made outside engineering. Finance teams, investors, and existing enterprise agreements often drive the decision more than technical fit. Joachim notes a common pairing: organizations using Google Workspace for productivity but AWS for cloud infrastructure, partly because the Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) integration with AWS Identity Center works more smoothly via SCIM than the equivalent Google Workspace setup, which requires a Lambda function to sync groups. Measuring Platform Success: Cycle Time Above All When Mattias asks how a team can tell whether a platform is actually successful, Joachim separates subjective and objective measures. On the subjective side, he points to developer happiness and developer experience (DX). Feedback from delivery teams matters, even if surveys are imperfect. On the objective side, his favorite metric is cycle time — specifically, the time from when code is ready to when it reaches production. He also mentions uptime and availability, but keeps returning to cycle time as the clearest indicator that a platform is helping teams deliver faster. This aligns with DORA research, which has consistently shown that deployment frequency and lead time for changes are strong predictors of overall software delivery performance. Start With a Highway to Production A major theme of the episode is that platforms should begin with the shortest possible route to production. Mattias calls this a "highway to production," and Joachim strongly agrees. For greenfield projects, Joachim favors extremely fast delivery at first — commit goes to production, commit goes to production — even with minimal process. As usage and risk increase, teams can gradually add automation, testing, and safeguards. The critical thing is to keep the flow and then ask "how do we make those steps faster?" as you add them, rather than letting each new step slow down the pipeline unchallenged. He also makes a strong case for tags and promotions over branch-based deployment, noting his instinctive reaction when someone asks "which branch are we deploying from?" is: "No bra