Kaylee Van De Voorde co-authored this article.
Has your team adopted a DevOps mindset? Are your engineers using tools like Docker containers, Kubernetes and Terraform? Over the last decade, many engineering teams that adopted DevOps culture and pivoted to cloud-native applications that required rapid scaling may face a new set of problems.
DevOps
DevOps practices have brought operations and software engineering teams together throughout the entire development life cycle, from initial concept through the engineering process to production support. This collaboration paved the way for iterative development: Improving velocity, providing rapid feedback and consequently improving application quality by uncovering bugs and environment requirements earlier without user impact. DevOps automation created a more “blameless” culture that improved trust, collaboration and innovation, which boosted team morale and increased engagement.
That said, DevOps teams have encountered many obstacles, including fears of job obsolescence and steep learning curves for every member. Teams that learned how to implement DevOps practices on their projects may have moved more slowly at first while learning how to work together in new ways and adopting new tools.
What is Platform Engineering?
So, what is platform engineering? Platform engineering bridges the existing gaps between software, hardware and infrastructure that come with adopting DevOps practices: Automated horizontal scaling, service discovery and cost optimization. Platform engineering makes it even easier and simpler for engineers produce high quality applications quickly by standardizing CI/CD deployments, ensuring that infrastructure is auditable and monitored, automating deployment methods and processes, providing accurate documentation and incorporating FinOps.
Platform engineering teams can make these improvements available to their teams by creating tools such as an internal developer platform (IDP) that includes APIs that expose internal tools and features within the platform.
The Next Evolution
Evolution does not mean starting from nothing.
The core tenets of DevOps practices still hold their value; aligning software engineering and operations teams to better create applications that embody business and user functionality and run smoothly within an incorporated infrastructure, automation, security and dedicated site reliability engineering (SRE). Many DevOps teams may already be moving toward an overarching platform engineering culture and simply need to refine their standards. Distinct application teams may already be building similar features to provide platform functionality; a strong indication that a platform engineering team would be beneficial.
Choosing to create a dedicated platform engineering team has tradeoffs: Building a platform engineering team pulls resources from building applications and new features that the business needs, but application teams could experience an increase in productivity if a separate platform engineering team is created. A dedicated platform engineering team can also provide clear, unified direction and nuanced goals for application teams; this is incredibly important when creating standards and internal tools.
A platform engineering team is just one way that to advance and improve engineering culture. DevOps teams that may not require platform engineering can continue their growth by refining their existing practices and patterns in their everyday work.
