Everything You Need To Know About Platform Engineering
Aggravated because you can’t run the app you created end-to-end? Why not harness the limitless perks of automation in software deployments in order to deliver better performance? Platform engineering endorses automation in application development and deployment to take the load off developers to some extent.
That’s why many software firms are heading to platform engineering in order to secure faster application delivery and better performance. Almost 80% of global software engineering firms will launch in-house platform teams to multiply their output capacity and elevate their performance.
This blog discusses how platform engineering has unlocked new dimensions of software development to facilitate developers.
What Is Platform Engineering?
Platform engineering is all about creating toolchains and workflows required throughout the lifecycle of an application. It frees you from the hassles associated with application development by empowering automation.
We empathize that it’s daunting to reach out to the DevOps team every time you want to deploy new software or update an existing feature. Despite all the favorable facets, DevOps limits developers to some degree by complicating development and deployment procedures.
Platform engineering puts an end to this by enabling self-service within a cloud environment. The core purpose behind platform engineering is to allow the end-to-end application lifecycle monitoring access to the developer without external intervention.
In this process, you needn’t rely on DevOps engineers to deploy and maintain features and changes in applications created by you as you can access automated tools to get the job done. Given that, you needn’t master the skills to use all DevOps tools either.
The Fundamental Difference Between DevOps and Platform Engineering
It’s meaningless to assume that DevOps and platform engineering are poles apart because they are actually two flanks of the same coin.
Platform engineering can be precisely described as an execution of the core conceptualized strategies of DevOps.
Fundamentally, DevOps purports to upscale output volume and software quality simultaneously using inventive tools, frameworks, and collaboration strategies. Platform engineering offers a centralized platform of integrated tools and workflows to minimize the ‘creative load’ from DevOps associates. In fact, platform engineering is a pretty significant part of DevOps strategies.
What Are The Core Principles of Platform Engineering?
Platform engineering comes with a set of principles. Let’s discuss them in detail-
1. Need-oriented Support
Remember that the core objective of platform engineering is to simplify and automate the functions of developers. Therefore, the platform developed by your platform engineers should support the individual requirements of your team instead of restructuring the development infrastructure that’s already in place and working well.
Platform engineers can think of developing a feature that portrays how your development infrastructure will perform in fresh staging environments. This will save the extra time spent on experimentation.
2. Access to Self-service Tools
Developing an internal developer platform with the assistance of platform engineers means allowing developers easy access to a toolbox of control tools. All the self-service tools integrated into the platform should be easily accessible for developers.
Ensure that the platform gives inventive prompts to developers based on their requirements instead of suggesting generalized solutions.
3. Constant Upgradation
As software development is an ever-changing process, your internal developer platform must be evolving persistently in order to catch up with the development requirements.
You are to ensure that timely improvisations are integrated into the platform so that it meets the requirements of your internal developers.
4. Automation and IaC
Your internal developer platform offers required infrastructure management services in an automated manner. That’s why developers don’t need to pay extra for infrastructure management when you have such a developer platform in place.
Such a platform ensures an automated and reproducible development infrastructure with very little space for manual intervention. IaC tools are integrated into the platform to determine its outlook.
When Should You Have a Platform Engineering Team?
Is the confusion regarding hiring platform engineers dwelling in your mind? There are certain circumstances when you must consider hiring a platform engineering team and we are mentioning them here-
- Product development requires the utmost concentration and distractions cause noticeable deterioration in output quality in the case of software development. If you want the core in-house team of engineers to concentrate on product development, you shouldn’t allocate other responsibilities like infrastructure management or code pipeline handling to them.
- As your in-house development team expands in size, application scaling starts becoming complicated. This becomes more prevalent in the case of developing microservices In fact, not all developers possess innate expertise in dealing with operational challenges that arise in the process of developing applications and scaling them. The ones that aren’t proficient at handling operational glitches can be the weak links in the entire development process, slowing down the work pace. Once you witness this happening, think of launching a platform engineering team.
- If experimentation is your intent besides application development, it’s better to onboard some skilled platform engineers permanently. Especially if you’re a cloud service provider, innovating new hacks of cloud-native application deployment is the key to service upgradation for your company.
Relating to the aforementioned points? If so, don’t hesitate about hiring expert platform engineers to create a solid platform engineering team.
Wrapping Up
Lack of synchronicity in application development and deployment affects the output quality adversely and platform engineering is the smartest solution to that problem.
Why hold back from exploring the diverse perks of platform engineering when leading global organizations have already adopted the tech for seamless infrastructure management services? Give your internal developers the privilege of supervising the entire development process with platform engineering.