Silos Are Fantastic. Just Ask Kelsey Hightower.

Why It Matters

Treating internal silos as API‑driven products reduces friction, speeds delivery, and lets engineers focus on high‑value innovation.

Key Takeaways

• Silos work well when separated by clear APIs.
• Platform engineers should expose contracts, not force universal IaC tools.
• Collaboration should focus on complex problems, not routine tasks.
• Users benefit from simple, self‑service interfaces like airline apps.
• Proper API contracts enable automated credential retrieval and service access.

Summary

The video features Kelsey Hightower arguing that silos, when mediated by APIs, are beneficial rather than harmful. He challenges the prevailing push for universal collaboration and self‑service across all layers.

He explains that platform teams should provide stable, well‑defined contracts, allowing developers to consume services without learning low‑level tooling like Terraform for simple tasks. Collaboration is reserved for building new capabilities such as choosing a caching solution.

Hightower uses the airport analogy—passengers don’t want to operate planes, they just want a ticket—and cites examples like fetching credentials from Vault at startup. He stresses that most users never meet the engineers behind electricity or cloud infrastructure because of these abstractions.

The implication is that organizations can accelerate delivery and reduce cognitive load by treating internal services as products with clear APIs, reserving cross‑team effort for truly novel problems. This approach reshapes platform engineering toward product thinking and improves developer experience.

Original Description

In this clip from PlatformCon 2024, Kelsey Hightower breaks down how teams are misunderstanding "silos" and how we shouldn't be so quick to abandon them.

In the full fireside chat, Kelsey Hightower and Kaspar von Grünberg take a deep dive into platform engineering examining its origins, the challenges and lessons learned, and what the future might hold.

See the full talk: https://youtu.be/puxNUkbrCVk