I know my company is likely not the norm, but we can’t use Google App Engine or anything like that because we are a CDN. Our infrastructure is core to our product.

I know this might be unreasonable, but I always get frustrated when everyone suggests that anyone running their own infrastructure is clearly doing it wrong. I get that most dev groups are creating web apps and should use a PaaS, but there are also a lot of us who are CREATING those platforms that other companies use. We also have to write and deploy software, and sometimes I wish I could have discussions about how to do that without most responses being that we shouldn’t do that.

Maybe general developer forums like HN aren’t the best place to have those conversations, but I haven’t found great active forums dedicated to platform developers.

I'm sure there are many people in the same boat, but I don't know that there could be the forum you imagine, not with our current cloud landscape. You're building a CDN, Netflix's video CDN is different from Akamai's is different from Fastly's is different from yours, internally and externally. More mainstream; AWS engineers don't know GCP's architecture don't know Azure engineers' needs. And just right there are 7 different dialects of "cloud".

There's tons of interest, but much of the knowledge is covered behind corporate NDAs/employe and getting people aligned on terminology and technologies is hard because so much is hidden behind NDAs. The current solution is either to work for a big company where there's rigorous internal discussion or go to tech conference after-parties and hope to meet the right people at the right time/place on the Ballmer curve to have a productive discussion.

If your infrastructure is core to your product then your product teams should be working on it. There are definitely teams who should be making infrastructure because it's a differentiator for them. But an internal platform team seems like an antipattern, because at that point you've got the worst of both worlds - your platform is just as distant from your developers as something like AWS, and is unlikely to offer better functionality than AWS.

Kind of, but it has better observability, more reliable networking, and supports the specific subset of features needed from that platform, and better flexibility in terms of what you actually need, while not locking us to a specific way to write applications (like google app engine).

Heroku's simplicity for deploying is honestly a thing to aim for, but using Heroku at scale while keeping things consistent and secure is extremely difficult. It's not built for large, complex infrastructures. It's built for small shops and ad-hoc deployments, and it's dope for that.