Platform Engineering: the future of DevOps?

Platform Engineering: the future of DevOps?

Platform Engineering is a relatively new way of organizing IT teams. The promises are compelling: greater efficiency and productivity for teams, standardization of tools and processes within the organization, and cost savings. At the same time, many organizations have embraced the DevOps approach, which has been around for some time. In this blog, we explore the relationship between Platform Engineering and DevOps and their impact on organizations’ IT operations. In doing so, we’ll take a specific look at how Platform Engineering can influence the DevOps way of working.

A brief history lesson

Before discussing current trends in Platform Engineering, let's first go back to the 1990s and early 2000s to see how IT teams were organized back then.

During that period, teams were highly siloed: one team was responsible for developing an application, while another team was responsible for running that application in production. Once the development team had delivered a new version, they handed it over to the operations team. Although this seems like a logical division of labor, in practice it caused a lot of friction between teams.

Developers only found out whether their application was working properly in production after the operations team had deployed it—a process that often took a long time. Even more frustrating was that, if something went wrong during deployment, the operations team would return the program to the development team to fix the problem. It’s clear that this approach created bottlenecks in the deployment process and significantly slowed down development.

The industry struggled with this situation for a long time, but eventually switched to a new way of working: DevOps. DevOps can be interpreted in various ways, but is essentially a set of principles aimed at streamlining software development and delivery. Instead of developers simply “passing the buck,” they are now responsible for deploying their own applications.

This is often summarized as: “You build it, you run it.”
To make this cultural shift possible, far-reaching automation is required. Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Continuous Integration (CI), and Continuous Delivery (CD) are examples of techniques used in this context. The cloud has also contributed significantly by providing scalable, elastic, and highly automatable infrastructure. Taken together, the DevOps philosophy has enabled organizations to deploy applications quickly and reliably.

No matter how effective the transition to DevOps has been, this shift has also introduced new challenges. Development teams are now responsible for deploying their own applications. In addition, developers must be familiar with a wide range of new technologies: cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.), Infrastructure as Code tools (Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation, etc.), and pipelines (Azure and GitLab pipelines).

That’s a lot to ask of people who want to focus primarily on building applications and deploying them to production. Ideally, there’s a middle ground between outsourcing all IT administrative tasks entirely or handling them entirely within the development team.

What is Platform Engineering?

Platform Engineering shifts infrastructure management to a central team within the organization. This takes a huge burden off development teams. Instead of dealing with the complexity of IT infrastructure management, they can focus on where they add the most value: developing software.

Please note: Platform Engineering does not outsource all DevOps-related tasks to teams outside the organization. Platform Engineering makes a clear distinction between the management and the use of infrastructure. Administrative tasks, such as managing a Kubernetes cluster or setting up Azure pipelines, are performed by the platform engineering team.

Teams can then use this infrastructure themselves in whatever way works best for them—for example, by using Azure Pipelines to deploy their application to the Kubernetes cluster. This allows teams to leverage modern infrastructure without the associated cognitive load. Platform Engineering is thus a strong example of task division, something that is already quite common in many “ industries.”

How will Platform Engineering influence DevOps?

Given the benefits that Platform Engineering offers, does this mean that organizations will completely abandon the DevOps way of working? The short answer is: no. Instead, these two approaches will continue to coexist and complement each other. There are several reasons for this.

Although some of the responsibilities of DevOps engineers are being transferred to a central point within the organization, this certainly does not apply to everything. Teams can still use the infrastructure provided by the platform engineering team for their own DevOps tasks, such as Kubernetes deployments or running pipelines.

At its core, DevOps is primarily a mindset, and Platform Engineering preserves and supports that mindset. This way of thinking has led to the DevOps practices we know today, with the goal of making development teams more productive and accelerating deployments. At the same time, we see that some of these practices are now reaching their limits. Platform Engineering builds on DevOps and fills in where existing DevOps practices fall short, but never at the expense of the DevOps mindset itself.

Conclusion

We have seen how the DevOps revolution has enabled development teams to become more productive and deploy applications faster. At the same time, team members now need to be familiar with many new technologies, which leads to a higher cognitive load and additional work. Platform Engineering relieves teams by eliminating the administrative tasks associated with DevOps, while still allowing them to perform the DevOps tasks specific to their applications.

Although Platform Engineering continues to support the same DevOps mindset, it improves current DevOps practices. We can therefore conclude that Platform Engineering is the next step for organizations that want to further increase the productivity of their development teams.

How can we help you?

As Platform Engineering continues to evolve, it offers organizations a promising path to streamline their IT operations and better align them with business objectives. With experience in development and DevOps operations dating back to 1997, SUE is at the forefront of this evolution. We have supported organizations at every stage of the development lifecycle, from design to operations. Our expertise has been instrumental in building custom platforms for a wide range of clients, each with their own unique needs.

Our combined experience and expertise have led to the development of our groundbreaking Multistax platform. This platform embodies our in-depth knowledge and expertise and offers a tailored solution to the specific challenges and needs of modern IT operations. Want to know what Platform Engineering can do for your organization? Contact us to discuss more efficient software development.

You can read about how SUE sets up an internal developer platform on the Platform Engineering page. The Platform Engineering Guide explains when such a platform is worthwhile.