Platform Support And Enablement

Who this is for

• Data Platform Engineers who support internal users (data engineers, analysts, ML teams).
• Engineers setting up developer portals, templates, and golden paths for data work.
• Team leads creating support processes, SLOs, and enablement programs.

Prerequisites

• Familiarity with data platform components: storage (data lake/warehouse), orchestration (Airflow or similar), transformation (dbt or SQL), CI/CD basics.
• Basic incident response concepts (severity, escalation).
• Comfort with writing clear documentation and checklists.

Learning path

1. Learn the difference between Support (reactive) and Enablement (proactive).
2. Define support channels, intake forms, SLAs/SLOs, and a triage workflow.
3. Create golden paths: templates, starter repos, and paved-road docs.
4. Set DX metrics: time-to-first-pipeline, MTTR, deployment frequency, change failure rate.
5. Roll out changes safely: versioning, deprecations, comms, migration guides.
6. Observe, measure, and iterate with feedback loops and office hours.

Note: The Quick Test is available to everyone; only logged-in users get saved progress.

Why this matters

Real tasks you will do as a Data Platform Engineer:

• Unblock teams when pipelines fail, without becoming a bottleneck.
• Provide a paved path so new projects ship in hours, not weeks.
• Maintain SLOs (e.g., incident response and resolution) and reduce MTTR.
• Manage support channels (tickets, chat, office hours) with clear priorities.
• Publish migration guides and runbooks for safe platform upgrades.
• Track adoption and DX metrics to guide the platform roadmap.

Concept explained simply

Platform Support is the help desk for your data platform: you triage issues, fix urgent problems, and keep the lights on.

Platform Enablement is the coach: you give teams tools, templates, docs, and training so they can move fast without you.

Mental model

• Runway: Golden paths and templates help teams take off safely.
• Control tower: Triage and SLOs coordinate traffic and incidents.
• Toolbox: Starter repos, runbooks, and cookbooks solve common jobs.
• Radar: Telemetry and feedback loops show where to improve next.

Core components of Support and Enablement

• Support channels and intake: ticket form with mandatory fields (impact, severity, steps tried, logs).
• SLAs/SLOs: target response/resolution times by severity; publish clearly.
• Triage workflow (IDEAL): Intake → Diagnose → Empower → Automate → Learn.
• Golden paths: opinionated templates for ingestion, transformation, and CI/CD.
• Runbooks: step-by-step guides for common incidents and operations.
• Documentation: short, task-focused, with copy-paste commands and screenshots.
• Training: office hours, onboarding labs, and 30–60 minute enablement sessions.
• Observability: dashboards for job success rate, queue health, and user adoption.
• Change management: versioning, feature flags, deprecation windows, migration guides.
• DX metrics: time-to-first-pipeline, MTTR, deployment frequency, change failure rate, ticket backlog age.

Worked examples

Example 1: Triage a failing pipeline

1. Intake: Confirm severity (users blocked?), capture logs, pipeline ID, last success time.
2. Diagnose: Check platform health dashboard; compare recent changes (deploys, quotas).
3. Empower: Share the minimal fix teams can do (e.g., lower parallelism, clear stuck run).
4. Automate: Add an alert to catch quota breaches earlier.
5. Learn: Update the runbook with the exact error signature and resolution steps.

Example 2: Build a golden path for ingestion

1. Goal: Ingest table from source to lakehouse daily with schema checks and data quality tests.
2. Template: Starter repo with Airflow DAG, dbt model, and CI for tests.
3. Docs: One-page guide: prerequisites, step-by-step setup, troubleshooting.
4. Metric: Target time-to-first-pipeline under 2 hours for a new team member.

Example 3: Safe deprecation of a connector

1. Plan: Provide v2 with adapters; keep v1 for 60 days.
2. Comms: Announce now, weekly reminders, and 7-day final notice.
3. Safety: Feature flag and dual-run option for high-risk teams.
4. Guide: Migration steps with code diff examples and rollback steps.
5. Success: 0 Sev-1 incidents and 90% migration by day 45.

Example 4: Intake form and priority

• Fields: environment, severity, business impact, error snippet, last success, changes made, steps tried.
• Priority matrix: P1 = production outage; P2 = production degraded; P3 = non-prod blocked; P4 = request/question.

Exercises

Do these now. They mirror the graded exercises below.

Exercise 1: Write a Tier-1 incident runbook outline

Scenario: Production pipelines across multiple teams are failing with a shared compute pool error.

• Create a runbook outline with sections: Scope, Triggers, First checks, Containment, Root-cause paths, Comms template, Escalation matrix, Verification, Post-incident tasks.

Exercise 2: Triage and prioritize a support queue

Tickets:

• A. Non-prod job failed overnight; workaround exists; small team.
• B. Production ingestion down for a revenue dashboard; no workaround.
• C. Access request for a new project; unblock within 2 days.
• D. Question about best practices for dbt testing.

Task: Assign priority (P1–P4) and channel (ticket, chat, office hours) for each, and write one-line justification.

Checklists

Common mistakes and self-check

• Mistake: Only firefighting; no enablement. Fix: Reserve weekly time for templates, docs, and automation.
• Mistake: Vague intake. Fix: Mandatory fields and examples of good tickets.
• Mistake: Hidden SLAs. Fix: Publish SLOs and show them on dashboards.
• Mistake: Breaking changes with no rollback. Fix: Feature flags, dual-run, and clear sunset dates.
• Mistake: Overlong docs. Fix: Short task pages with copy-paste blocks and a Troubleshooting section.

Practical projects

• Build a "time-to-first-pipeline" starter kit: repo, one-page guide, and CI checks.
• Create a support intake form and triage SOP using the IDEAL workflow.
• Write and validate two runbooks: "Cluster quota exceeded" and "Credential rotation failure." Run tabletop drills.

Next steps

• Instrument DX metrics and add them to a team dashboard.
• Pick one recurring issue and automate the first fix step.
• Plan one enablement session with a clear before/after success metric.

Mini challenge

In 30 minutes, draft a "golden path" one-pager for adding a new source to your lake or warehouse. Include prerequisites, 5–7 steps, validation, and rollback. Share with a teammate and ask them to try it verbatim.

Reminder: The Quick Test on this page is open to all; log in if you want your score saved.