Introduction to Platform Engineering
What is platform engineering?
Platform engineering is a practice built up from DevOps principles that seeks to improve each development team’s security, compliance, costs, and time-to-business value through improved developer experiences and self-service within a secure, governed framework.
Gartner expects around 80 percent of engineering organizations to have a team dedicated to platform engineering by 2026.
These teams focus on building what's called an internal developer platform.
These platforms include tools that:
Help developers be self-sufficient (for example, starter kits and IDE plugins).
Assist with common tasks.
Encapsulate common patterns and practices into reusable building blocks.
Provide early advice and feedback on problems or security risks.
Simplify operations by managing underlying infrastructure and tools.
What is an internal developer platform?
An internal developer platform focuses on a company’s internal development practices. You define a set of recommended and supported development paths to production and incrementally “pave” a way through them with an internal platform.
Developers are the primary consumers or customer of an internal developer platform. Automation and centralization enable efficient operations while ensuring that stakeholder requirements like compliance are met.
With platform engineering, you create this internal platform by combining a product mindset with learnings from DevOps and DevSecOps to deliver a set of tools. These tools provide sufficient automation, tracking, governance, and observability that guide development teams naturally “into the pit of success.”
Platform engineering was adopted for increasing speed or velocity in delivering products. Centralized teams eliminate the need for each team to worry about infrastructure, thus increasing efficiency
An internal developer platform helps you centralize and scale specialized knowledge across the entirety of your development and operations lifecycle by reducing or eliminating cognitive load and manual steps.
Platform Engineering vs. Application Engineering
While platform engineering and application engineering are closely related, they have distinct roles within an organization. Platform engineering focuses on building and maintaining the infrastructure and tools that developers use to create applications
"Platform Engineering streamlines development by creating tools that increase systems resiliency and enhance efficiency to accelerate value delivery."
Quick Recap Quiz:
1.What is the primary role of platform engineering in an organization?
A. Building user-facing applications or services.
B. Creating marketing strategies for the company’s products.
C. Creating and managing a cohesive, integrated platform that supports developers in building, deploying, and maintaining applications.
Ans. C