Building Real-World Platforms: Abby Bangser on CNCF, Kratix, & Syntasso

When organizations grow beyond using third-party platforms, they face a critical challenge: how to build internal platforms that enable teams to work efficiently while maintaining security and compliance. Abby Bangser, founding principal engineer at Syntasso, shares insights on creating real-world platforms that strike the right balance between standardization and flexibility.

Key Insights

• The shift from external platforms to internal ones often comes from specific business needs, like compliance requirements
• Successful platform engineering requires finding the right balance between prescriptive standards and flexible customization
• Platforms should offer multiple levels of abstraction - from simplified "paved paths" to advanced customization options
• Platform teams should watch how users interact with their services to identify emerging patterns and needs

Guest: Abby Bangser, Founding Principal Engineer at Syntasso.

A hands-on software delivery professional with a passion for using quality as the foundation for quick value-focused delivery. Abby truly embodies the benefits of being a specialising generalist with experience and interests across traditionally Business Analyst, Quality Analyst, Developer, DevOps, Platform Engineering, SRE, and Infrastructure Engineering job titles and effectively leveraging those skills to encourage a well-rounded approach to quality software delivery.

The next step for software professionals is the ability to drive thoughtful creation and evaluation of data from the operation of live services. With this in mind, Abby is currently excited to be working in an environment where engineers build and run their own software and understand the value of not only monitoring and logging, but striving for an observable system. It is now her goal to use these tools to create even more collaboration across skills like user research, quality, operations, infrastructure and software development to identify unknown issues that our users face in innovative ways.

Abby Bangser, Bluesky

Syntasso

CNCF

Links to interesting things from this episode:

• ThoughtWorks
• Massdriver
• Kratix
• OpenTofu
• “Let a 1,000 flowers bloom. Then rip 999 of them out by the roots.”
• Charity Majors