[devnexus 2026] Sociotechnical Platform Engineering

Speaker: Chris Corriere (@ecology_chris)

See the DevNexus live blog table of contents for more posts


Garden analogy

  • Continuous delivery of fish and vegetables
  • The structure defines the system

Platform

  • Abstraction of complexity
  • 2 sided networks (sometimes n sided)
  • Opportunities for business to serve customers (ex: airport or shopping mall)
  • Business isn’t responsible for handling restroom, etc

DevOps

  • Reduce friction to prod
  • ICE CALMS acronym. Integration, Continuous Deployment, Experimentation, Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, Sharing

SRE

  • Production stability
  • Must have all four of these:
  • SLA (Service level agreements)
  • SLO (Service level objectives)
  • SLI (Service level indicators)
  • Error budgets

Maps

  • Value stream map – horizontal through organization
  • Social practice – decenter process
  • Wardley map – source vertical dependencies for each process
  • A security patch can’t go faster than a trivial change.

Useful to graph

  • Duration
  • CI/CD wait time

Comparison

  • DevOps – SLIs, version control, bronze, python notebooks
  • Shared Social Practices – SLOs, integration testing, silver, databricks/snowflake
  • SRE – SLAs, response time, gold, Apache Spark (powers databricks under the hood)

Shared between DevOps and SRE

  • ML Ops – vector embedding, model selection, Ralph Wiggum, unstructured data
  • Shared Social Practices – RAG, agents, evals, semistructured data
  • SRE – rate limits, humans guard rails, structured data

Maps

  • Point of a map is to facilitate a conversation
  • All maps are wrong
  • Some are useful

My take

Lots of information. Some I knew; some I did not. A cookie analogy before lunch made me hungry, but it was a good map. Good visuals for the maps I wasn’t familiar with.

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