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 look specifically at the influence Platform Engineering can have on 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. When the development team delivered a new version, they handed it over to the operations team. Although this seems like a logical division of tasks, in practice it caused a lot of friction between teams. Developers only found out whether their application worked properly in production after the operations team had deployed it — something that often took a long time. Even more annoying was that if something went wrong during deployment, the operations team would return the program to the development team to fix the problem. It is clear that this way of working caused bottlenecks in the deployment process and significantly slowed down development.
The sector struggled with this situation for a long time, but eventually switched to a new way of working: DevOps. DevOps can be explained in various ways, but is essentially a set of principles aimed at streamlining software development and delivery. Instead of developers "throwing their application over the fence," they are now responsible for deploying it themselves. This is often summarized as: "You build it, you run it."
To enable this cultural change, far-reaching automation is required. Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Continuous Integration (CI), and Continuous Delivery (CD) are examples of techniques used to achieve this. The cloud has also contributed significantly to this by providing scalable, elastic, and easily automatable infrastructure. All in all, the DevOps philosophy has enabled organizations to deploy applications quickly and reliably.
However effective the transition to DevOps has been, this movement has also introduced new challenges. Development teams are now responsible for deploying their own applications. In addition, developers must be knowledgeable about 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 on building applications and putting them into production. Ideally, there is a middle ground between outsourcing all IT administrative tasks completely or keeping 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 move all DevOps-related tasks outside the teams. Platform Engineering makes a clear distinction between the management and 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 the way that works best for them, for example by using Azure pipelines to deploy their application on the Kubernetes cluster. This allows teams to make optimal use of modern infrastructure without the associated cognitive load. Platform Engineering is therefore a strong example of task distribution, something that is already very common in many sectors.
How will Platform Engineering influence DevOps?
Given the advantages offered by Platform Engineering, does this mean that organizations will completely abandon the DevOps way of working? The short answer is no. Instead, these two ideas 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 knowledgeable about many new technologies, leading to higher cognitive load and extra work. Platform Engineering relieves teams by removing the administrative tasks of 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 over 28 years of experience in development and DevOps operations, SUE is at the forefront of this evolution. We have supported organizations in every phase of the development lifecycle, from design to operation. Our expertise has been instrumental in building custom platforms for a broad range of customers, each with their own unique needs.
The sum of our experience and expertise has led to the development of our groundbreaking Multistax platform. This platform embodies our in-depth knowledge and know-how and offers a targeted solution to the specific challenges and needs of modern IT operations. Are you ready to explore the possibilities of Platform Engineering and discover how it can transform your organization? Contact us and discover how our expertise can pave the way for a more efficient, productive, and innovative future in software development.
