What is Platform Engineering?

A new way to organizational SDLC

What is Platform Engineering?

A new and emerging approach to organizational SDLC is set to boost the delivery of applications at a pace that can provide businesses value. It is called Platform engineering. Developer experience and productivity are expected to reach new heights due to self-service capabilities and automated infrastructure operations of Platform engineering.

Platform engineering has become the topic of conversation because of its ability to optimize developer experience and boost development teams’ delivery without compromising customer value. But, How is platform engineering executing things?

We will cover this later in detail; but to answer the question: Platform engineering provides a broader, more mature, and consistent set of tools and processes enabling developers to focus on development instead of managing the underlying toolset.

Platform engineering overcomes the so-called advantage of “flexibility” from the traditional SDLC approach. Where engineering teams were fighting to bridge the gap between shorter SDLCs and maintain supporting toolchains. Platform engineering provides a specialized role to manage the underlying platform of development tools, services, and environments.
Gartner quote | Cloudanix
Platform engineering emerged in response to the increasing complexity of modern software architectures. Today, non-expert end users are often asked to operate an assembly of complicated arcane services.
Gartner

Diagram of Platform Engineering

Diagram of platform engineering

How does Platform Engineering work?

As we have already understood what platform engineering is; let us take a look at its working.

A dedicated product team creates and maintains the engineering platform, which is designed to support the needs of engineering/development teams while working in complex infrastructures.

You must know that the capabilities of engineering teams depend entirely on their end users' needs. Thus platform teams need to understand the needs of their end-user group, prioritize work, and build a platform that satisfies their target user groups.

Platform-building efforts are initiated using internal developer portals called IDPs which are also well-known for their maturity level. For easy consumption by development teams, subject matter experts select and package a curated set of tools, capabilities, and processes. This effort takes platform teams closer to their goal of optimized developer experience with the right capabilities to reduce SDLC.

What are the goals of platform engineering?

As you know, the purpose of platform engineering is to enhance user experience and provide business value. Let us understand how these goals are achieved.
  • Consistency and Efficiency: Platforms provide standardized tools and processes that eliminate inconsistencies and inefficiencies across engineering teams.
  • Developer relief: Developers are enabled to focus more on development instead of managing toolsets, delivery pipelines, and low-level infrastructure.
  • Transparency and Traceability: Platforms offer improved visibility into infrastructure and application components, making it easier to track changes and debug misconfigurations.
  • Scalability and Performance: Platforms enable smooth scaling of resources and optimize performance and maintain user experience.
  • Reduce operational complexities: Platforms streamline workflows and automate tasks, leading to decreased operational complexity and freeing up resources for other required activities.
Keep in mind that platform engineering is an ongoing process. This means that platform engineers have to keep up with the new technologies to keep the platform competitive. To name a few, tasks such as finding areas of improvement, reducing costs, and improving application performance are involved.

Benefits of Platform Engineering

There are several benefits that the platform engineering promises, some of which are listed below;

  • More development time for developers improves the quality of the project for end-users.
  • Uniform tools and processes for all teams improve development consistency.
  • Uniform development platforms surpass the vast learning curve of developers at the time of switching from system to system. This makes cross-platform and cross-team collaboration much more effective.
  • A specialized team for resolving encountered problems in a tool or a task saves developers time.

Drawbacks of Platform Engineering

With the number of benefits provided, there are also several drawbacks that organizations should consider.

  • Due to the cost and security constraints, implementing the platform needs strong involvement and support from senior management.
  • Platform engineering is not a one-man-do-all task. Organizations need to hire more people with expertise in the platform. This increases the cost to the business.
  • Using a software development platform is like maintaining one other system. Depending on a single development platform may limit the creativity of development teams.
  • A platform needs to be uniform, but a platform designed for one project may not suit the other. Thus, limitations can be seen in the types of projects that it can support.

Do you need platform engineering?

Now that you have understood the concept of platform engineering, it is time to ask “Do you need platform engineering?” let us make it simple for you. The simple answer to this is; IT DEPENDS! You read that right, it depends on several factors that should be considered before you implement platform engineering. But, what things to consider? Below is a list of 3 basics that we think organizations should consider before diving in;

Engineer Efficiency

Assess how self-sufficient your engineers are, and determine the balance between their productive tasks and repetitive tasks (Toil). To be more specific; the amount of time spent on delivering business value is important.

Infrastructure complexity

The complexity of your infrastructure can affect you tremendously, especially when you have multiple application teams and you operate in cloud.

Introduce a platform engineer

In case you have to start, organizations can start by having a specialized engineer working closely with the application team. They can help teams understand what each team needs to do their work faster and more securely.

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