Jack of all trades, master of none
The original idea of DevOps was to merge development and operations, but the gap between these two worlds has become too wide for one person to master alone. Today, the sheer amount of knowledge needed to manage modern cloud infrastructure is just as demanding as writing the application code itself. Expecting a single engineer to be an expert in both areas creates an impossible amount of mental pressure. To solve this, we need to stop forcing developers to struggle with the underlying machinery and instead provide them with a centralized layer that abstracts this complexity away.
A Mindset That Enables Growth
Used by many high-performing companies like Spotify, platform engineering is a discipline focused on building an internal “platform as a service.” This platform provides common services and capabilities that can be easily replicated and scaled for many internal developer teams, who act as the “customers” of the platform. This Internal Developer Platform (IDP) isn’t just a collection of tools, it provides three key things to engineering teams:
- Self-Service Capabilities: Developers can get what they need, when they need it, without filing a ticket.
- Common, Standardized Tools: The “golden path” of approved, secure, and efficient tools for the job.
- Standardized Workflows: Automated, repeatable processes for building, deploying, and observing software.
The benefits are significant, directly impacting the bottom line. You reduce costs by eliminating redundant work, enable software engineers to focus on value-generating code and standardize on a few proven methods instead of supporting dozens. This keeps both architectural complexity and maintenance overhead low.
The Strategic Shift: Productize Your Platform
We have reached a point where all but the most complex use cases can be solved with off-the-shelf tooling. The traditional impulse was to build a new, custom solution for every use case, believing it was uniquely optimized.
The modern, efficient approach is to standardize on a few proven methods. This trades minor, perceived optimizations for the massive, real-world cost savings and speed of a reliable, reusable solution.
Invent the feature, not the tool
Your external product is likely a set of standardized features combined to deliver a specific experience. You wouldn’t build a bespoke system for every single customer—the costs would be prohibitive.
Your internal platform is no different. You must productize the platform just like the product itself. By creating standardized, easy-to-use, self-service workflows, you force the platform to be user-friendly for its customers: your developers.
This standardization is what allows you to deliver value faster, drastically reduce development and maintenance costs by focusing on a few core methods, and be able to pivot effectively when the market demands it.
Where to start
To start with Platform Engineering, you must treat your internal infrastructure as a product and view your developers as actual customers. Focus on a few key “products” in your organisation you can “sell” to your developers. So just like you make a nice webshop, products and easy checkout. Tools like Backstack.io or Multistax.com can help create these webshops for developers. Next create building blocks with industry-tools like Terraform to remove the manual deployments and standardize the solution.
How can we help?
Partnering with a specialized Cloud Native expert like SUE accelerates this transition from theory to practice. We support organizations by for example implementing tools like Backstage and writing building blocks usable by the developers. We also offer our Multi-Cloud platform tool Multistax which provides an immediate foundation for self-service infrastructure. Not sure where to start? Our Platform Roadmap Workshop is designed to create a compelling product vision for your platform and translate it into an actionable roadmap. We engage all stakeholders to make sure the key objectives align with business priorities and ensure commitment to the platform’s purpose.
