BBD’s expert Managed Platform Services team (MPS) designs, builds and operates platforms and services in the cloud and on-prem, relieving the burden of finding and managing Site Reliability Engineers (SREs)
MPS provides an affordable and agile solution for businesses looking to create a consistent and sustainable performance without high resource overhead. MPS is a team of SREs and Platform Engineers (PEs) offering management of platforms as a service and delivering a production-ready and capable platform environment, covering the design of toolchains and automation and the creation of internal developer platforms, and platform maintenance.
MPS: A solutions-driven service
Building, maintaining, running, hardening and innovating the modern software platform requires technical specialists, SREs and PEs, who need a combination of ingenuity, technical skill, and a methodical approach to repetitive tasks.
“Given that a large percentage of modern software systems are built and deployed on platforms, SREs and PEs are both increasingly in demand and scarcity,” says BBD director Russell Davidson. “This is the crux of what our MPS service solves. While you want the guarantee of an expert engineer ensuring your production platform stability and uptime, most of the time spent is on repetitive tasks easily performed by a less experienced engineer. BBD’s Managed Platform Service is an offering that gives your business access to a pool of junior and intermediate SREs to ‘keep the lights on’ with the oversight of senior and principal engineers.”
Why MPS is valuable to businesses
“We have repeatedly seen overburdened development teams struggle with the additional cognitive overhead to manage toolchains and maintain and provide a suitable platform experience for production workloads,” says Davidson. “Designing toolchains and automation toward an internal developer platform while maintaining a production-ready platform is a vital goal. BBD understands the importance of designing, maintaining, and operating platforms to facilitate the delivery of business value safely and expeditiously in a cost-effective manner.”
BBD EU business development director Liesl Bebb-McKay says, “The move to cloud computing has meant a significant shift in operating models for many of our clients and, in most cases, involved a large project to ensure a smooth transition. But many of those projects were about ‘getting to the cloud’. Ensuring your infrastructure remains sustainable and cost-effective is the next phase in the cloud journey.
“We realised that in many cloud transformations, the SRE element was either poorly considered or not planned for at all. We also realised that the team that takes you to the cloud often require different skills and passions to keep you there! And thus the creation of MPS – a sustainable approach to cloud operations,” she says.
MPS delivers a managed solution, leveraging engineering excellence and deep technical support from our SRE professionals. “MPS solves three primary operating concerns,” explains Bebb-McKay. “Bridging the skills adjustment required as an organisation moves from the “going to the cloud” to the “staying in the cloud” phase. Ensuring the balance between the optimisation of the cost equation and the delivery of expert services, as well as committed on-the-ground resources.”
Further characteristics of MPS include:
Sustainable
Reliability and stability are critical to a sustainable platform, but this can come at a high resource cost. By providing a dedicated team of junior and intermediate SREs focused on platform reliability and growth, supported by on-demand senior SREs, MPS delivers all the benefits of a full-time team at an affordable price point.
Professional
SREs and platform engineers are essential in delivering business improvement and efficient IT services. As a dedicated full-time team, MPS ensures software that improves the reliability of production platforms – fixing issues, responding to incidents, and ensuring the longevity of the platforms under management.
Reliable
Reliability is fundamental to digital effectiveness. SREs provide for operations at scale. MPS teams reduce significant amounts of toil across the deployment pipeline, reducing technical debt and ensuring improved customer experiences by focusing on problem identification, root cause analysis, and optimised solutions.
The benefits for your business
BBD’s Managed Platform Services offers an alternative to finding and recruiting scarce talent (SREs and PPEs). In so doing, it provides retention of this talent and ensures expert oversight of your production platform. It’s a cost-efficient method of keeping the platform stable and ensuring it is future-proof.
Further benefits for businesses include:
- Consistent and reliable platform operations
- Fully managed or augmented service
- Knowledge transfer
- DevOps competency
- Improved platform availability, efficiency, and reduced deployment risk
- Higher levels of application reliability and resiliency
- Increased team efficiency through automation
- Improved customer satisfaction and retention
“MPS ensures a managed production environment, continuous uptime and improvement of platforms. SRE best practices include internal team oversight, platform design, improvement, and incident management,” says Bebb-McKay.
BBD understands the importance of designing, maintaining, and operating platforms to facilitate the delivery of business value safely and at speed. Partner with us to ensure your platforms are sustainable and performing optimally.
Get in touch for more information on BBD’s Managed Platform Services
