Defining Platform Engineering for IT Leaders

This article is the first in a series that delves into the practice of platform engineering, which has emerged as a critical discipline in today’s rapidly evolving IT landscape. In our first installment, we define platform engineering and take a look at how it differs from DevOps, site reliability engineering (SRE) and other development models, and examine what’s driving its growing popularity.

Software development has come a long way from the days of using physical CDs to install applications designed for specific hardware and environments.

As technology has evolved, from client server to internet/Web 2.0 to cloud native, today’s applications have to be flexible enough to run across a variety of environments, including on-premises datacenters, edge computing environments, and public and private multicloud architectures.

To navigate this evolving landscape, development approaches such as DevOps and SRE rose in popularity. These models helped break down silos of development and operations to raise the prospects of reliability, streamline operations, improve collaboration, and boost automation and scalability.

However, organizations are beginning to realize that DevOps and SRE aren’t always enough to help them overcome the challenges of promoting operational consistency, managing infrastructure and keeping developers productive.

That’s why platform engineering is becoming compellingly popular. It’s just one more way to streamline software delivery – in this case, by creating platforms tailored to developer and application needs.

Platform Engineering: What It Is and How It Works

Platform engineering is a development model delivered by a centralized function. It focuses on building and maintaining internal development platforms that offer up rich self-service environments.

These self-service capabilities empower developers to build, deploy and manage applications with attractive speed, consistency and reliability – and without having to handle infrastructure tasks such as provisioning, cloud configurations, networking, or security policies.

One way to look at platform engineering is that it’s essentially the as-a-service model taken to its most logical conclusion. Platform engineers deliver a set of as-a-service capabilities that allow developers to focus solely on code from beginning to end.

The platform could be infrastructure in the form of compute, network and storage, which would still be managed by IT. On top of that, platform engineers build and deliver capabilities such as database, middleware, caching, and queuing – or even identity, observability or security services.

With all of these microservices and middleware, developers are like kids in a candy store, where they can pick and choose what the application needs based on the type of application and the stage of the software lifecycle. Platform engineers assemble them into a flexible, customized environment in one click and on-demand for the developer.

With platform engineering, you can standardize tools and frameworks and automate the development lifecycle while staying flexible enough to accommodate extremely diverse applications.

The Shift Toward Platform Engineering in a Cloud-First World

Platform engineering emerged and began to grow in popularity several years ago. The convergence of four important trends drove this industry-wide shift:

1. The rise of the public cloud and cloud-based applications.
2. The growing use of microservices-based architecture, which changed how we access and use applications.
3. The advancement of automation technology.
4. The increasing dependence on as-a-service offerings, from storage-as-a-service to data-as-a-service to, most importantly, infrastructure-as-a-service. 

These trends required a shift in thinking around the development of applications. They also introduced a lot more complexity into the mix.

The limitations in DevOps and SRE development models at the time were also factors in driving organizations toward platform engineering. For DevOps, it can be difficult to find good developers that also excel in operations, the lack of standardization between teams can become a serious pain point, and inconsistent practices can hinder automation and governance at scale.

SRE teams can become so busy with incident response and mitigation that it limits their ability to focus on proactively improving reliability. And again, the focus of SRE’s on production workloads can lead to a lack of consistency between production cloud platforms and developer environments, complicating infrastructure management.

These IT trends and challenges in existing development models caused organizations to realize the value of abstracting infrastructure from software development across the full application life-cycle from dev to QA to production.

It’s no longer hard-coupled to specific hardware or a single environment. By abstracting the infrastructure and using automation, platform engineers can make a range of services available that developers can use on demand with a click or two. Everything from middleware to microservices can be a simple API call away.

Self-service isn’t new; IT operations have had self-service capabilities for a long time. But platform engineering takes self-service to a new level. It’s not simply clicks, it’s also API-first and infrastructure-as-code first, integrating user management and security features. This API-first approach enables platform teams to offer services with robust guardrails, including rollback and access control, as well as observability capabilities.

For instance, when a developer requests a VM, they get the VM plus a dashboard that monitors performance, provides metrics and offers troubleshooting information. This API-driven self-service model for platform engineering ensures greater automation, consistency and scalability, making it superior to traditional self-service methods.

In addition to abstraction, standardization is a critical benefit of platform engineering. It allows platform teams to efficiently patch tools and applications the right way and create consistent security, access and user management policies while leaving developers free to focus on building and delivering value for the organization.

By abstracting infrastructure away and building in mix-and-match self-service capabilities for developers to use, platform engineering helps:

Standardize cloud operations

Platform engineering helps you set up common patterns and best practices across all your cloud environments, which minimizes inconsistencies and risk of human error, while helping to work towards compliance.

Excellent self-service capabilities

On-demand cloud resources allow developers to provision and deploy applications without waiting on infrastructure teams.

Enable developers to focus on code

Developers don’t have to worry about things like Kubernetes configurations, cloud security policies or pipeline management.

Outstanding security and governance by design

Platforms make it easier to enforce security policies, access controls and compliance standards.

Enable scalability without bottlenecks

A good platform makes the scaling of applications across hybrid multicloud environments efficient, while addressing the need for manual interventions.

Agile Software Development 

As hybrid multicloud adoption continues to grow and applications transition in sophistication, it’s vital to enable developer flexibility, speed and autonomy without jeopardizing security and governance. Platform engineering provides the structured yet agile approach your organization needs to support modern software delivery at scale.

By incorporating a platform engineering approach to your software delivery practices, you can develop speed in innovation while maintaining high standards of reliability, efficiency and security. This can potentially help position your organization for long-term success in an increasingly complex digital landscape.

In the next installment of this series, we’ll explore a real-life case study that demonstrates the relevance of platform engineering beyond cloud-native environments, extending to traditional VM-based applications.

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