The emergence of developer platforms has transformed the way software development teams design, architect, build, and deploy applications. Platform engineering saw its birth in this paradigm shift.
However, unlike its predecessors, platform engineering places a distinct emphasis on treating the platform not as a mere project, but as a product in its own right. It provides clear guidance on collaborative interactions within teams and delineates self-service interfaces, which is important to streamline the development pipeline.
Much like the principles of DevOps, platform engineering hinges on automation, prioritizes cross-functional collaboration, and underscores the importance of human elements over technological ones. It harmoniously aligns with DevOps practices, offering a scalable approach for enterprises navigating complex and diverse environments.
Research has revealed that a staggering 93% of enterprises affirm that the adoption of platform engineering represents a significant stride forward. As per the same study, 94% agree that the concept has empowered their organizations to fully reap the benefits of DevOps.
The colossal character of the concept poses a challenge of uncovering its facets, as it has so much to discuss and offer. In the ensuing discussion, we disintegrate this inexhaustible concept into understandable components and make an attempt to explain it and its significance in the most lucid manner.
What is Platform Engineering?
Platform engineering aims to craft self-service functionalities to reduce the mental burden on developers and facilitate swift software deployment. It can be seen as a process, function, or practice, wherein specialized teams provide internal users, mainly software developers and engineers responsible for delivering value, with shared infrastructure platforms.
A prime example can be seen in Netflix’s implementation of the Netflix Internal Developer Platform (IDP). This proprietary platform empowers developers with self-service capabilities, enabling them to deploy and oversee their applications. By leveraging this platform, Netflix effectively distributes content to millions of global users. The widely used OTT platform manages this mammoth scale of operations while maintaining an excellent pace of updates, continuous innovation, and remarkable availability and reliability.
So, basically, the practice revolves around the creation of an Internal Developer Platform, a comprehensive amalgamation of technologies and tools meticulously curated by a platform engineering team. This unified ecosystem paves the way for a standardized and streamlined software delivery process.
The functionalities embedded within this engineering platform are tailored to the unique requirements of its end users. As a result, the platform is purpose-built to be easily accessed and utilized in a self-service manner.
What is the Role of Platform Engineers?
Let’s say a technology firm has been experiencing a surge in demand for its innovative software applications. But as the number of users and clients increases, so do the complexities of managing the underlying infrastructure. It recognizes that a dedicated platform is essential to streamline the software development lifecycle, ensuring faster and more reliable delivery of applications.
Platform engineers arrive to fill this gap, bringing experience, knowledge, and skills across areas. The extensive range of tasks they perform is dictated solely by the nature of the project, though in general, platform engineers
– Monitor the performance of the infrastructure using tools like log analysis, performance metrics, and alerts. In the event of any issue, they promptly investigate and resolve them to minimize any impact on performance.
– Automate various stages of the product development lifecycle, including testing, deployment, and configuration management.
– Maintain and update the underlying infrastructure, including hardware, software, and storage resources, ensuring the infrastructure’s reliability, scalability, and security.
– Proactively apply patches and security updates to mitigate potential risks and rigorously test updates before deployment.
– Debug and resolve application issues, identifying the root cause of problems and implementing necessary changes to restore functionality, thereby minimizing disruptions for users.
In performing this role, platform engineers bring a diverse set of skills to excel in their roles. These include strong coding skills using programming technologies like C++, Java, .NET, Python, etc., proficiency in Unix and Linux, and experience in practices like DevOps, continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), and configuration and change management. They should also be well-versed in infrastructure as code, and be familiar with cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes and Docker.
What are the Functions of Platform Engineering?
Platform engineering is pivotal in modernizing enterprise software delivery, particularly in the context of digital transformation initiatives. By providing the necessary infrastructure, tools, and practices, it accelerates the adoption of modern technologies and methodologies, enabling organizations to stay competitive in today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape.
Building Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs)
Platform engineering caters to the needs of internal application and operations developers by building IDPs. These platforms offer self-service capabilities and abstract away complexity, allowing developers to focus on crafting high-quality applications without getting bogged down by infrastructure intricacies. IDPs streamline the development pipeline, as they provide a seamless environment where developers can deploy, monitor, and manage applications efficiently.
Reducing Cognitive Load
By abstracting the intricacies of infrastructure, platform engineering liberates development teams from the mental strain of navigating complex technical details. In turn, it enhances the overall developer experience, allowing them to channel their cognitive resources toward innovative problem-solving and delivering tangible value to customers. Engineers thus no longer find themselves mired in the minutiae of infrastructure management, but rather, can focus on leveraging the platform’s capabilities for streamline development.
Efficient Code Deployment
Code deployment is a principal step in the entire software engineering process. With platform engineering, the process of deploying code is orchestrated through the adept use of tools and workflows, where the power of techniques like Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is harnessed for the automation and streamlining of the deployment process. So, it builds a delivery pipeline as a series of automated steps that take code from development to production.
Serving as a shield between Developers and Infrastructure
In the application development process, delivery teams may face issues due to complexities linked with infrastructure. The practice serves as a protective barrier between developers and the underlying infrastructure and hence streamlines the end-to-end process. They leverage tools and techniques to shield developers from the complexities of managing infrastructure, allowing them to focus well on building and maintaining the application.
Perfusing Reusability
Reusable tools form the backbone of a robust toolchain and are also one of the development best practices. Platform engineers configure tools to make them adaptable across various projects and teams. The aim is to maximize the tool’s utility against the project’s requirements. As a result, they optimize the utilization of tools and ensure their best use across the entire development lifecycle.
Developing an Automated Infrastructure Management Framework
Automating infrastructure management is a key function that the concept serves. Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) makes its way in this role to build a fully automated environment for managing hardware and software components. By automating infrastructure, a dynamic and flexible environment is created that easily adapts to changing demands. Tasks such as server provisioning, load balancing, and scaling based on real-time traffic patterns are all accommodated with ease as a result.
Why is Platform Engineering growing important?
A well-structured platform accelerates digital transformation, driving competitive advantage and sustained growth on the technological front, side-by-side helping the business activities that are technology dependent. As a result, the practice is continuing to grow in importance and becoming a by-default process in modern software development lifecycles. Some important reasons contributing to this rise of the concept are:
Accelerated Release Velocity
One of the most compelling indicators of platform engineering’s impact is the remarkable surge in development velocity experienced by 68% of respondents. It makes the code behave consistently across various stages of the software development lifecycle, iterations take place at a rapid pace. The release velocity of moving code from development through testing and into production is improved. Additionally, new features and updates can be rolled out to end-users much faster than in traditional development environments.
Developer Productivity Enhancement
Through pre-built modules, frameworks, and APIs, platform engineering functionalities enable developers to focus on building application logic rather than reinventing infrastructure, so that they are more productive in performing their duties. By sidestepping time-consuming tasks, they can direct their energies toward building application logic and crafting unique, value-added features. Developers are thus unburdened by the need to reinvent the wheel and can focus on critical phases of the project.
Reduction in Operational Complexity
Traditionally, IT operations teams would have to grapple with managing servers, networks, databases, and various other components individually. Each of these elements can become a potential bottleneck in the deployment process. However, with platform engineering, these underlying complexities are hidden behind a unified and streamlined interface. When an issue arises, the platform team can pinpoint the problem more efficiently because they’re not sifting through layers of infrastructure intricacies.
Self-Service Capabilities
Engineered platforms offer self-service interfaces for developers to provision resources, reducing dependencies on operations teams, which is particularly important from the angle of fostering a culture of autonomy. Developers have a sense of ownership and can adapt their resource allocations on-demand, without being hindered by bureaucratic processes or the need to wait for operations teams to make adjustments.
Standardization of Application Architecture
Platform engineering establishes consistent architectural patterns across the organization’s computing infrastructure. Regardless of the specific computing needs of different departments or teams within the organization, there is a common foundation in place. The standardization reduces the occurrences of potential conflicts or compatibility issues that may arise when integrating new services. With a standardized architecture, everyone involved in the organizational compute ecosystem can work with a shared set of conventions and best practices.
Meeting Contemporary Standards
The adoption of cutting-edge technologies and practices on an ongoing basis gets simplified with a strong developer platform built against the backdrop of recent innovations. The platform serves as a foundation for experimenting with emerging tools. It serves as a cohesive framework that can swiftly incorporate the latest advancements in AI, Analytics, and the cloud, keeping the enterprise ever-competitive in the advancing technology-driven atmosphere.
Controlled Infrastructure Spending
Platform engineers continuously monitor and adjust resource allocation so that resources are neither underutilized (leading to wastage) nor overprovisioned (which can result in unnecessary expenses). For instance, during periods of high demand, additional resources are provisioned, while during periods of low demand, surplus resources are de-provisioned. This kind of dynamic scaling guarantees optimal performance but also prevents unnecessary expenditure on resources that are not actively being used.
Risk Reduction
Platforms enforce security, compliance, and best practices, reducing vulnerabilities and mitigating risks associated with manual deployments. The overall stability and resilience of the system witnesses a major improvement, as platforms systematically identify and address potential weak points, which also significantly decreases the likelihood of security breaches or compliance violations. Engineering a platform thus serves as a proactive security strategy to build a dependable ecosystem.
Scaling Up Against Growing Business Volumes
Platform engineering enables applications to seamlessly handle increased workloads. Through horizontal and vertical scaling, the platform can accommodate higher transaction volumes without sacrificing performance. Horizontal scaling, often referred to as “scaling out,” entails the addition of more resources or nodes to the platform’s infrastructure. On the other hand, vertical scaling, known as “scaling up,” focuses on optimizing existing resources by enhancing their individual capacities. Together, these scaling strategies empower the platform to accommodate higher transaction volumes without compromising performance.
What are the Benefits of Platform Engineering?
It comes as no surprise that platform engineering has emerged as a driver in modern software development. Business leaders are advocating its adoption due to the many positive changes it introduces, as summarized by its following benefits.
Enhancing Observability
By implementing standardized monitoring and logging practices, platform engineers ascertain that every component generates consistent and structured data. They use unified dashboards and visualization tools, to get a centralized view of critical metrics and obtain quick insights into anomalies or performance issues.
Ecosystem Expansion
The practice involves designing robust APIs and SDKs, facilitating seamless integration with external services, due to which helps build a diverse set of applications and services.
Opportunity to Monetize
Platforms enable revenue generation through various mechanisms like subscription models, in-app purchases, or third-party integrations. They provide billing and authentication systems, ensuring secure and seamless transactions.
Ever Availability
Using technologies like content delivery networks (CDNs) and distributed databases, the platform remains operational even during high traffic or in the event of hardware failures. Availability of the system reduces redundancy, effectively handles load balancing, and equips with better disaster recovery strategies.
Rapid Development and Deployment
Platform engineering emphasizes containerization, microservices architecture, and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. These techniques streamline development, testing, and deployment processes.
System Stability
Incorporating rigorous testing, monitoring, and fault-tolerant design, platform engineering provides a stable foundation that mitigates performance bottlenecks and system failures.
Improvement of Process Standards
Engineered platforms include the latest tools for code review, documentation, and performance profiling, enforcing high development standards. The implementation of industry best practices such as DevOps methodologies, version control systems, and automated testing follows as a part of the process.
Conclusion
Enterprise IT is a complex endeavor. It demands prioritizing team dynamics, developer experience, feedback loops, and also effective product management. Amidst these complexities to navigate, platform engineering arises as a promise and sets a course of productivity.
However, establishing platform teams and building a functional internal development platform (IDP) will require an initial investment of funds and time. Apart from technical aspects, the cultural and human aspects too will play their role and shape the process. Enterprises that will work with this holistic outlook will build a successful platform engineering practice.
