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The Federal Platform Engineering Community (FPEC) - Wiki

The Federal Platform Engineering Community (FPEC) will bring together technologists that are building and operating platforms that are better enabling software and systems, ultimately to help make developers more productive, their applications more rapidly able to be delivered and positively impacting end users. We will facilitate spreading lessons learned in building modern platforms to support a variety of needs across the federal government, as well as spreading the courage to change in adopting modern technology management and procurement practices. This community, while new, will continue conversations and partnership begun with the 18F DevOps Community of Practice.

The Platform Haiku captures our community’s mission well:

Here is my code Run it (in the cloud) for me I do not care how

The community allows technologists to share how they are making the most of their cloud capabilities, automating developer infrastructure environments, enabling developer self service, and implementing automation that can better secure platforms and their applications without slowing delivery of software or services. We seek to help bring technologists that are involved with platform engineering, DevOps, and agile methods together to share the following:

  • Draw from shared experiences, understand unique restrictions, all to better navigate the numerous product and process options
  • Share experiences and methods of platform teams successfully navigating “the red tape” and the bureaucratically hacks that are enabling meaningful modernization
  • Share code (IaC pipelines) to save time and money across the DoD, as well as allowing each of the platform teams to get further in their roadmap
  • Compare the pros and cons of various tools that are of interest to the joint platform community
  • Share lessons learned using tools and capabilities to better allow platform teams to more rapidly deploy new tooling
  • Allow a place for the government to provide broad, open market research for all platform teams to receive demonstrations from a variety of product vendors
  • Identifying and aligning on actions for senior service and DoD leadership to take action upon in order to enable improved digital capabilities

The Federal Platform Engineering Community will bring together technologists that are building and operating platforms that are better enabling software and systems, ultimately to help make developers more productive, their applications more rapidly able to be delivered and positively impacting end users.

Upcoming Events

Past Events

Join the Conversation

We’re using Discussions as a place to connect with other members of our community. We hope that you:

  • Ask questions you’re wondering about.
  • Share ideas.
  • Engage with other community members.
  • Welcome others and are open-minded. Remember that this is a community we build together 💪.

Join the Recurring Community Events

Please reach out to Brian Fox to be added to the recurring calendar invite. You can reach him at: [email protected]

Tech Syncs

We are also hosting recurring JCDC Tech Syncs to provide an open market research venue for government technologists and leaders to learn about the digital tools available from industry. Get engaged to learn more about vendor offerings and how they may help your program more rapidly modernize your digital capabilities.

What We Do

The Federal Platform Engineering Community meets monthly for 60 minutes. In each meeting, a presenter will have the opportunity to share experiences for 15 minutes, followed by a 15 minute Q&A session. We work towards the following:

This CoP allows technical staff and leadership from across the government to share their experiences and lessons learned developing and operating platforms.

We aim to help reduce the learning curve associated with individual agencies, bureaus, and offices platforms to support their various missions, stakeholders, and users.

Who We Are

Community co-lead Chris Lauer is the Chief Architect for NOAA’s National Weather Service. Chris returned to supporting operational applied science from three years at Air Force Kessel Run, where he led teams that operated TAS and Kubernetes backed platforms supporting hundreds of developers applying Agile and DevSecOps. Chris got started in platforms at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center where his team adopted containers, building a Docker-Compose workflow to streamline dev, staging, and FISMA high production deployments supporting space weather scientists and forecasters.

Community co-lead Dave Raley is the CX Digital Director at Marine Corps Community Service (MCCS). Dave has led the MCCS organization in digital transformation and cloud journey. Dave’s focus has been on is removing the cost of delay focused on process improvements which he estimates saves roughly $100K/application/month in costs. He’s focused on two key areas – authorities to operate (ATO) and acquisition speed/agility. MCCS is now taking IT and turning it into a profit center by offering other commands use of the pipeline for a fee.

Community co-lead Peter Burkholder is the former Compliance & Security lead for cloud.gov, currently on detail to the TTS DevTools project to build a FISMA Moderate SCM/CICD platform.

Community facilitator Brian Fox is currently the Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships at Omni Federal and supports the Army Enterprise Cloud Management Agency (ECMA). Prior to working as a member of the ECMA team, he was a Strategist at 18F where he facilitated digital modernization at HUD, DOE, DIA, and led the National Security and Intelligence Portfolio at 18F. At USGS he led systems development at their National Geospatial Technical Operations Center (NGTOC) where he oversaw development activity in support of The National Map. Brian has also supported the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in a variety of roles, including joint military assignments in the United States and overseas.

JCDC Content

With the consolidation of the Joint Cloud Delivery Community (JCDC) into the Federal Platform Engineering Community, folks can discover, review and watch past JCDC content.

Community Conduct

When participating in this Community, please respect your peers, use plain language, be patient, practice constructive criticism, and stay organized.