Platform as a Product

To maintain a competitive edge on the global stage, the U.S. must be able to rapidly generate superior insights by integrating vast amounts of data from disparate environments—many intentionally compartmentalized to safeguard national security. Rather than viewing decentralization as a challenge to be overcome, Booz Allen is empowering organizations to realize groundbreaking benefits through adopting a "platform-as-product" mindset.

Traditionally, the decentralized nature of critical data sets has been seen as a challenge. However, we’ve seen that pushing to create one-size-fits-all platforms leads to slower adoption rates and a less satisfying experience for developers.

This issue transcends mere convenience. Slower adoption rates mean fewer data sources being integrated for mission-critical insights, and a subpar development experience can hinder innovation vital for developing new approaches to problems—and, therefore, better outcomes for defense initiatives.

Rather than conforming to a strictly standardized approach, we focus on scaling data platforms effectively by adopting a "platform-as-product" mindset. This involves engineering a distributed data mesh and landing zone architecture, which empowers developers with the self-sufficiency they need to get the job done. This strategy facilitates easier data sharing and promotes the development of robust data products.

This mindset offers groundbreaking benefits, but it requires a strategic approach. The crux of the challenge in building scalable platforms lies in the relationship between the central platform team's available bandwidth and the growing demands to support an increasing number of users and platform features.

Often, in an attempt to quickly accommodate a user’s needs, developers will design and deploy a custom solution. These solutions, however, aren’t engineered to be available to all users, and, therefore, the underlying environments tend to diverge quickly over time due to configuration drift.

The result? As missions scale, the platform team increasingly struggles to keep up, leading to unsustainable levels of technical debt, stifled innovation, and a user perception that the platform is stagnating.

Thankfully, this is a solvable problem. Booz Allen’s approach to platform engineering is grounded in a comprehensive "definition of done" that encompasses several critical principles.

First, when building large-scale platforms, our “platform-as-product” mindset dictates that we generalize individual user feature requests for the platform into new capabilities that can be used by any future platform tenant.

Second, we embrace an "everything-as-code" mentality, automating wherever feasible—be it infrastructure, documentation, or compliance controls—using rigorous DevSecOps. This automation serves as the backbone for "self-service enablement," allowing us to offer platform capabilities on-demand through a developer portal. It’s important that we obsessively eliminate “TicketOps”; the interface between teams should be automation—not process.

Finally, we focus on portability. We design our solutions anticipating that they will be required to work across all the mission’s applicable classification levels. This approach addresses the scalability and agility issues inherent in traditional approaches to infrastructure while promoting a culture of innovation and self-sufficiency among developers.

In the landscape of modern platform engineering, the principle of "everything-as-code" is pivotal. This approach involves automating all aspects of the platform that can be automated, treating infrastructure with the same rigor and discipline as application software. By encapsulating infrastructure in code, we modularize it into individually consumable yet composable building blocks. This methodology not only streamlines development and deployment but also enhances scalability and reliability.

Adopting this principle means that every piece of the infrastructure—from networks and servers to data management and monitoring tools—is defined in code. This allows for seamless version control, code reuse, and a significant reduction in the likelihood of human error. Furthermore, it empowers developers to leverage continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, ensuring that changes are automatically tested and deployed consistently.

By treating infrastructure as code, we also facilitate a more dynamic and flexible platform environment. Developers can provision and modify resources quickly, adapting to changing needs without waiting for manual intervention. This approach aligns with the broader "platform as product" mindset, where the focus is on delivering platform capabilities that are both robust and adaptable, catering to the evolving requirements of various missions and projects.

In essence, "everything-as-code" is not just a technical strategy; it's a transformative practice that fosters innovation, efficiency, and a culture of continuous improvement within the realm of platform engineering.

The cornerstone of fostering a culture of autonomy and innovation within platform engineering is self-service enablement. By leveraging the modular, composable building blocks defined through our "everything-as-code" approach, we create our own simplified abstractions, enabling builders to provision exactly what they need, precisely when they need it.

This process often uses the best practices of defining infrastructure through declarative configurations stored in Git repositories (a practice known as GitOps). These versioned files represent the target state of the environment and, when changed, trigger automation workflows—seamlessly translating code into tangible platform capabilities.

The true power of self-service enablement lies in its ability to abstract away complexity. Builders no longer need to navigate the intricate details of the underlying infrastructure or the automation that orchestrates it. Instead, they interact with high-level configurations that define their requirements. This shift not only accelerates development cycles but also significantly reduces the potential for errors and mismatches between intended outcomes and deployed resources.

To further enhance the developer experience, we place self-service portals in front of these declarative configurations. These portals offer a user-friendly interface, guiding developers through the provisioning process with intuitive design and clear, concise options. This approach democratizes access to platform capabilities, enabling developers across the spectrum of expertise to contribute effectively and efficiently.

The portals also serve as a central hub for resources, documentation, and tools, streamlining the development workflow and fostering a more collaborative and innovative environment. Through self-service enablement, we empower our builders to focus on what they do best—creating solutions that drive mission success.

The concept of scalable landing zone architectures (LZA) stands at the forefront of creating secure, maintainable, and observable platforms that inherently support multitenancy. By integrating LZA from the outset, we lay a foundation that not only accommodates, but thrives on, the diverse needs of multiple tenants. This approach is in direct alignment with the Department of Defense (DOD) Cloud Computing Security Guide and adheres to the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Secure Cloud Computing Architecture framework, ensuring rigorous standards for security and compliance.

These scalable architectures compartmentalize the platform into distinct environments, each capable of being provisioned on demand by different tenants. This segmentation allows for a tailored approach to security and compliance, ensuring that each tenant's environment is isolated, secure, and configured to meet specific operational requirements.

By leveraging the landing zone architecture, we enable a seamless onboarding process for tenants, where they can select from a catalog of platform offerings and bootstrap their environments with the necessary tools and capabilities. This process is efficient while aligning with stringent security and compliance mandates.

Implementing a landing zone architecture means that each tenant's infrastructure can be provisioned with automation, ensuring a quick, consistent, and error-free deployment process. Furthermore, this architecture facilitates easier maintenance and upgrades, as changes can be rolled out to individual zones without impacting others. Observability is another key benefit, as the delineation of environments allows for more granular monitoring and analysis, enabling timely identification and resolution of issues.

In essence, LZAs represent a paradigm shift in how platforms can support multitenancy securely, compliantly, and efficiently. This architecture not only enhances the security posture and operational efficiency of the platform but also provides a scalable foundation that can adapt to the evolving needs of DOD and other organizations requiring high levels of security and flexibility.

Our mission is to create platforms that can reach department scale while being sustainably maintained and easy to use. Booz Allen’s approach to platform engineering adopts a product mindset to deliver platform capabilities in a secure, standardized, and individually consumable—yet composable—way.

For the teams building these platforms, it drives down the operational overhead, allowing them to focus on innovation at the speed of need for their builder communities. For builders, it results in platforms that get out of the way by enabling them to independently provision the right tools for the job, streamlining data product development to make a differentiated mission impact.