Bridging the Gap: Fostering Collaboration Between Development and Infrastructure Teams
- Corbin
- Jun 19, 2024
- 2 min read

In the fast-paced world of tech, bridging the gap between development and infrastructure teams is crucial for success. Here are a few points we believe can help foster collaboration and ensure smooth operations between teams.
Understand Each Other's Work
The first step in fostering collaboration is understanding. Development teams don't necessarily need to know all the ins and outs of the infrastructure, but it helps if they appreciate the complexities involved in maintaining that infrastructure.
Infrastructure teams should try to understand the complexities and challenges of rapid development cycles. When each team appreciates and understands what the others are going through it helps build respect and smoother communication.
Shared Vision
A shared vision is essential, and it’s management’s role to provide it. Clearly defined goals and expectations set the stage for both teams to understand what they're working toward.
Management must align both teams toward these common objectives and provide routine updates to track progress. Regularly celebrating wins and analyzing failures helps reinforce the shared vision and keeps everyone motivated and aligned.
This shared vision ensures everyone is working towards the same outcome, reducing friction and fostering teamwork.
Stable and Predictable Platforms
Having worked alongside developers for the last decade, I’ve come to appreciate the intricacies of their work and the challenges they face. They often bridge the gap between product managers and less technical teams, helping them understand what’s feasible to develop and what’s not.
The hot new buzzword "Platform Engineering" is one I'm excited about. At its core, it's about providing a platform designed to facilitate software development. I've always been a fan of self-service tools, which are a big part of platform engineering.
It leverages automation, developer platforms, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and a whole slew of other tools to streamline efficiency in developing and releasing software. I'm excited about it because it reduces the time to spin up new infrastructure and ensures configuration baselines across environments, which helps promote stability and predictability.
Easy Resource Provisioning
A crucial aspect of platform engineering is enabling developers to quickly spin up resources across environments and infrastructure for testing. It's advantageous to infrastructure teams to provide tools to facilitate easy resource provisioning. This agility not only accelerates the development process but also promotes an easy avenue for teams to experiment and innovate.
Embracing Platform Engineering
Platform engineering can automate many tasks, enhancing predictability and efficiency. By creating automated systems for resource management, deployment, and monitoring, both teams can focus on their core tasks without worrying about underlying infrastructure issues. Automation reduces errors, improves reliability, and ensures a consistent environment for development and operations.
Fostering collaboration between development and infrastructure teams requires an understanding of each other's work, a shared vision, stable platforms, and easy resource provisioning. While platform engineering can provide the necessary tools to facilitate this collaboration, it’s ultimately up to the teams themselves to want to work together, bridge the gap, and make each other’s lives easier.
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