What is Platform Engineering? How is it different from DevOps?
Have you ever wondered how Spotify manages to recommend the perfect song for your mood, or how Uber can connect you with a driver in minutes, anywhere in the world? These seamless experiences aren't just magic, and they're not solely the result of AI. They're powered by a powerful approach to infrastructure and applications called Platform Engineering. Let's dive into what Platform Engineering is, how it differs from DevOps, and why it's becoming the secret weapon to increase productivity in tech companies. You can really 10x Developer Productivity in 2024 with Platform Engineering
The Chef Analogy
Imagine you're a chef in a busy restaurant. In the traditional model, you'd be responsible for everything: sourcing ingredients, prepping, cooking, and even washing dishes. That's exhausting and inefficient, right? Now, picture a kitchen where you have a team of sous chefs who handle all the prep work, a well-stocked pantry that's always filled with the freshest ingredients, and a dishwashing system that cleans up automatically. Suddenly, you can focus on what you do best – creating culinary masterpieces. That's exactly what Platform Engineering does for software development.
What is Platform Engineering?
Platform Engineering is the art of creating a robust, scalable, and user-friendly internal platform that takes care of complex infrastructure and operational tasks, allowing developers to focus on building great products.
Key Components of Platform Engineering
Infrastructure Abstraction: Using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform or Pulumi to create layers of abstraction over raw infrastructure resources.
Containerization and Orchestration: Implementing technologies like Docker and Kubernetes to manage container ecosystems.
CI/CD Pipeline Management: Building and maintaining continuous integration and deployment pipelines using tools like Jenkins or GitHub Actions.
Service Mesh and Networking: Implementing solutions like Istio or Linkerd for service discovery, load balancing, and traffic management.
Observability and Monitoring: Integrating tools for logging, metrics, and distributed tracing to provide comprehensive insights.
Security and Compliance: Implementing security best practices and ensuring compliance with industry standards.
Developer Portals and Self-Service Interfaces: Creating internal developer platforms (IDPs) that provide self-service capabilities for resource provisioning and deployment.
API Management and Service Catalogs: Managing internal and external APIs, ensuring proper versioning and documentation.
Database and Storage Management: Setting up and managing database clusters and storage solutions.
Automation and Tooling: Creating custom tools and scripts to automate repetitive tasks and improve workflows.
What is Platform Engineering Sketchnote @pvergadia
Platform Engineering in the Software Development Lifecycle
Platform Engineering serves as the foundation supporting the entire software development and deployment lifecycle. It provides standardized environments for development, automated CI pipelines for building and testing, reliable CD pipelines for deployment, and ongoing support for monitoring and maintaining applications in production.
Platform Engineering vs. DevOps
While Platform Engineering and DevOps are closely related, they're not the same thing. Here's how they differ:
Historical Context: DevOps emerged around 2009 as a cultural and operational movement, while Platform Engineering is a more recent evolution addressing scaling challenges in large organizations.
Scope and Focus: DevOps focuses on cultural changes and improving the entire software delivery lifecycle, while Platform Engineering concentrates on building internal platforms and tools.
Team Structure: DevOps often embeds operations skills within development teams, while Platform Engineering typically involves a dedicated team serving multiple development teams.
Evolution: Platform Engineering can be seen as an evolution of DevOps principles applied at scale, rather than a replacement.
It's more accurate to say that Platform Engineering builds upon DevOps principles, extending them to create standardized, scalable platforms that support multiple development teams in large organizations.
Real-World Example: Spotify's Backstage
Spotify faced a challenge as it grew: with hundreds of development teams and thousands of microservices, maintaining consistency and efficiency became increasingly difficult. Their solution was Backstage, an open-source developer platform now managed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
Backstage embodies Platform Engineering principles through:
Standardization of interfaces
Self-service capabilities
Improved visibility of services
Automation of routine tasks
Knowledge sharing and best practices
By implementing Backstage, Spotify dramatically improved developer productivity, reduced onboarding time for new engineers, and accelerated innovation across the company.
Conclusion
Platform Engineering is revolutionizing how companies operate applications at scale. While DevOps laid the groundwork for better collaboration between development and operations, Platform Engineering takes it to the next level by creating a standardized, efficient ecosystem for software development.
As we've seen with Spotify's Backstage, the results can be transformative. Platform Engineering is becoming an essential strategy for tech companies looking to boost developer productivity and maintain their competitive edge in today's fast-paced digital landscape.
