Platform Engineering

Platform Engineering is creating and designing tools and workflows for developers to remove complexity and provide self-serving capabilities. It is an emerging concept in modern software development. 

Platform Engineers create an Internal Developer Platform (IDP), where developers can find different tools and technologies. These tools and technologies lower the cognitive burden on developers. It lowers the burden by helping them manage different tasks.

Role of Platform Engineering within DevOps#

cloud platform engineering

Platform Engineering is a part of the DevOps philosophy that embraces collaboration, automation, and continuous delivery. Internal Developer Platform (IDP) helps you streamline your software delivery process.

It addresses some key concerns that include:

  • Building Infrastructure 
  • Automation
  • Tooling
  • Collaboration
  • Scalability
  • Reliability

Platform Engineering within DevOps helps achieve the goal of faster, reliable, and efficient software development and delivery. Platform engineering acts as a helping hand for developers by providing them with tools and workflows for stable deployment. By doing so they support the entire DevOps lifecycle.

Rise of Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs)#

Here’s a quick history lesson on DevOps. By understanding the pre-DevOps and post-DevOps era your questions about Platform Engineering will be answered. You’ll be able to understand

How do IDPs emerge?

Why are IDPs important?

What role do IDPs play in increasing the efficiency of your organization?

Why should you have a platform engineering team for the Internal Developer Platform (IDP)?

Pre-DevOps Era#

Now let’s power the time machine and move some decades back. Let’s move back to the pre-DevOps era. This is the time when development operation teams are constantly in conflict. Teams in the organization are more divided than ever. 

Each team has separate responsibilities with little to no communication. Employees are punished for establishing informal means of communication within the organization. This created several problems. First of all, the lack of communication created inefficiency and complexity.

Operation teams are punished for the mistakes of the development team due to a lack of collaboration. This era is the worst nightmare of every development and operations team. 

DevOps Era#

Now let’s move forward to the time when AWS was first launched. This is the point in history that revolutionized the software development landscape. The introduction of cloud technology provided many benefits that include scalability, flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and reliability.

At the same time emerged DevOps practices. DevOps broke down traditional silos between development and operation teams. It focused on collaboration, communication, and working on shared goals for the benefit of the organization.

The evolution of technology solved many problems but it also introduced some new ones. Now developers have to master several different tools to successfully build, test, and deploy applications.

Post DevOps Era#

Now let’s move forward in the post-DevOps era where every organization is trying to replicate “you build it, you run it”. This slogan of DevOps is rather unrealistic. Big organizations can implement true DevOps but for small organizations, they see a fall in their performance.

This is when developers try to do DevOps tasks by themselves. Studies show when Organizations try to implement true DevOps, the overall performance of the organization drops.

This is where platform engineering teams build Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs). Developers can utilize IDPs to lower their burden and run their cloud services according to their needs.

Platform Engineering Principles:

In the past few years tech organizations have started to realize the importance of Internal Developer Platforms. Although IDPs can significantly improve your DevOps game, successfully implementing them is the problem. 

A recent report by Puppet State of DevOps states that Only incorporating platform teams does not improve your DevOps. Only the right teams can scale out the benefits. But sometimes the creation of a perfect team harms more than it benefits.

Platform Engineers might create complex software for the developers which they might avoid.  There are several other problems attached. To get the maximum benefit of Platform Engineering 

and Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) adhere to the following principles.

Treat IDP as a Product:#

According to another Puppet platform engineering report, platform engineers fail to deliver when they do not treat IDP as a product. To solve real problems, IDP should be treated as a product and developers as customers.

Developers need different tools for their product and every developer likes working with a certain set of tools. Instead of generalizing a platform with tools, platform teams should focus on creating tools that best align with developer and organization needs.

When creating tools for developers their feedback should be considered seriously. Your organization moves closer to true DevOps when platform teams make their choices with developers in mind.

Solve Common Problems#

The main focus of platform teams is to create solutions for developers that tackle common problems. Platform teams do not create already available software and refrain from other teams within the organization from doing so. Instead, they tailor these tools for developers to meet their needs.

The main purpose of the platform team is to remove bottlenecks and slowdowns. They do that by taking feedback from developers and analyzing their performance. 

Give Developers Leverage #

Tools within IDPs are created for developers, they should be given leverage to contribute to it. At the end of the day, they understand their needs better than anybody else. By keeping the product open source within the organization, developers can work on the product to make it better. 

Should developers be given a free hand? No set of rules should be defined. Each edit developers make should be passed by the platform team. Developers should be refrained from reinventing the wheel. 

Now the question is should open sourcing be introduced from the start? The answer to this question varies from organization to organization. You know your organization better than anyone. You should decide when and how it should be introduced.