Finland – Software package and information systems – Platform engineering

At the moment, VTT has no Platform Engineering Team or processes to use Platform Engineering tooling. All research support activities are built and applied case by case basis. Transfer of best practices is limited between implementations. FUTURE STATE VTT needs to define all needed processes and principles to implement PE discipline for project IT resourcing. VTT has dedicated Platform Engineering Team which includes key representatives from researchers (users) and key IT support personnel. The Platform Engineering team follows the Platform Engineering principles and has dedicated processes to manage resources, golden paths and update/develop new solutions within those. VTT has a clear path how solutions deployed and improved during use are stored for reuse as golden paths in the future. Researchers can manage most of the basic use cases without additional support from IT management and all infrastructure is used through PE tooling if possible. Practical tasks to apply: - Assemble a dedicated PE team responsible for overseeing the development and maintenance of the infrastructure. - Build a PE community within VTT, encouraging collaboration and knowledge sharing. - Include training and show casing for end users (researchers) - Enable continuous development and refinement of platform engineering practices to support researchers' evolving needs. - Adhere to growing regulatory requirements, such as ISO27001 and Finnish Act on the Secondary Use of Health and Social Data, 552/2019, ensuring compliance and data security. Technical needs In parallel to process design the MVP infrastructure must be defined and implemented for MVP Golden paths of demonstrational use cases: -Build a minimal viable platform infrastructure for VTT, ensuring all essential components are in place to support the functionality needed: -Self Service interface should minimize the time required to establish IT infrastructure for research projects, streamlining processes wherever possible. -Standardize common tools to create uniformity and ease of use across various projects. -Provide self-service options to empower researchers and reduce dependency on IT support. -Management of Golden Paths -Development and implementation of the two demonstrational Golden Paths together with key VTT researchers to use them -First minimal viable platform must be built to run on-prem, but later needs to be scalable towards public cloud or private cloud. -Existing VTT software and hardware contracts should be used as much as possible.