If you want your organization to start moving toward a more efficient and streamlined digital transformation, platform engineering is the only way to go. However, without a defined roadmap, most organizations will pretty quickly feel like they’ve wandered into the tech wilderness without a GPS. According to the State of DevOps Report 2023, it takes, on average, three years for platform engineering to start showing tangible results—but, in reality, the majority of companies will be struggling for a lot longer.
Getting platform engineering right will help organizations create an environment that energizes their teams to develop solutions more efficiently and with greater reliability, ultimately driving business growth. Below, I have set out some of the critical steps that organizations need to take to ensure that the right guardrails are put in place to achieve all of the benefits of platform engineering whilst avoiding some of the common pitfalls.
Step 1: Define Governance – Creating Order Amidst the Chaos
Before embarking on your platform engineering journey, it is crucial to define an effective governance framework. So many organizations attempt to implement new strategies without having a clear understanding of the whos, hows and whats of their processes, which has the net result of creating further complexity.
Start the process by determining your team’s roles and permissions and establish a center of excellence. In doing so, every team member will know their responsibilities and areas of expertise with a clear and comprehensive access control and permission structure. Follow this by creating clear governance policies and procedures which will serve as guidelines for how the platform will be managed and maintained to ensure consistency and security throughout the platform’s life cycle.
Step 2: Set up Your Service Catalog – Building a Digital Buffet
By seeking to improve the developer experience first, organizations will achieve better platform engineering results, which is why one of the most important parts is defining what goes on the digital menu. Once you have established an effective approach to governance, choose which services you want to integrate into your service catalog and self-service portal in a full GitOps approach, which is maintained by the platform team.
An effective platform lets anyone interact with tools and the cloud without needing to be a technical expert. It’s like having a tech buffet where anyone can choose their meal, but only if the self-service portal is intuitive and has a user-centric interface. Access controls need to be built into the platform with predefined governance so that users can only request services for which they have the right permissions.
Step 3: Improve Observability – Shedding Light on the Cloud
In the land of digital transformation, seeing is believing, which is where observability has a role to play. Improving observability is crucial for gaining insights into the platform’s performance and behavior, which involves integrating tools like event and project monitoring, cloud cost transparency, application performance, infrastructure health and user interactions.
In a rapidly growing cloud environment, observability enables teams to keep track of what is happening in terms of cost, usage, availability, performance and security across a constantly transforming cloud infrastructure. Once a project has been deployed, it needs to be managed and maintained across all cloud providers, something which is critical for keeping costs to a minimum but is often a huge and messy task.
Managing this effectively requires monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) and setting up alerts for critical events, and using logs and analysis tools to gain visibility into application behavior, track errors, and troubleshoot issues more effectively. Finally, implementing tracing systems that can track the flow of requests across various microservices and components helps to identify performance bottlenecks, understand latency issues and optimize system behavior.
Step 4: Plug CI/CD Pipelines – All Aboard the Automation Express
The next step is to turbocharge the platform by plugging in the CI/CD pipelines. These pipelines, connected to your Git, will generate templates with embedded automation, which allow automatic testing of code changes whenever developers commit or merge code into the repository. In doing so, this drastically reduces human error and ensures consistency throughout.
Following this with continuous monitoring and feedback mechanisms in the CI/CD pipelines ensures that only reliable, well-tested code makes it into production. These pipelines are orchestrated through APIs, which will make the digital journey faster and smoother.
Step 5: Set up FinOps & GreenOps – A Balancing Act for a Brighter Tomorrow
Finally, getting platform engineering right is as much about getting the technical basics right as it is about taking responsibility. By combining FinOps and GreenOps approaches and placing sustainability at the orchestration layer to empower users across the organization to consume less infrastructure, organizations can reduce software delivery/cloud costs and even their carbon emissions.
As I’ve written before in these pages, FinOps and GreenOps strategies go hand in hand – integrating cloud cost management and carbon footprint management is the most effective way to ensure that your journey is not just efficient but also environmentally conscious.
And that’s it. By defining governance, setting up an effective self-service portal, improving observability, plugging in CI/CD pipelines and embracing FinOps and GreenOps, organizations will be well on their way to creating a platform that’s not only efficient but also environmentally responsible.
