The growth of microservices, container orchestration, and other similar technologies has created new technical challenges. A lot of firms have developed platform engineering teams to take on these duties. In some ways, the function of a platform engineer is similar to those of other DevOps-related responsibilities. It is true that the term “Platform Engineer” is nothing more than a new name. A variety of reasons, however, have caused & continue to cause the primary duties of a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to alter.
These aspects include cloud providers’ rising popularity & scalability, Kubernetes, plus infrastructure as code. These variables’ paradigms open several abilities for a business, like service discovery as well as the capacity to easily grow horizontally, which might lead to even more revenue.
Established firms with legacy infrastructure are organizing in readiness for the grand cloud migration, while cloud providers are eager to welcome them. However, with this shift comes the requirement for cloud & container orchestration knowledge. As a result, enterprises are questioning whether they should build a platform engineering team. Companies that were formed recently before the actual Cloud don’t have most of these worries; there are fewer if any, legacy systems to contend with. It’s fairly usual for businesses to start and stay on cloud providers without really managing on-premises systems.
As previously stated, some perceive the profession of “Platform Engineer” to be just a different label for a task that has historically been handled by an infrastructure or DevOps team. Let’s take a deeper look at what platform engineering appears like nowadays to see why this isn’t quite accurate.
What is Platform Engineering?
Platform engineering is a technique that businesses employ to efficiently exploit their cloud platform just so engineers can bring value to production fast and consistently.
To put it another way, the platform engineering team assists the company by planning, creating, and administering its cloud platforms. Such platforms may then be used by software developers and other IT professionals throughout the company to deploy and run software in production in a secure, efficient, and dependable manner.
Many businesses struggle with many manual steps to get the code into production.
Manually establishing & configuring repositories, maintaining infrastructure elements, and perhaps even designing & handling CI/CD pipelines from unit testing through production are all part of the job. Simply put, such techniques are frequently prone to mistakes, slowing the road to production.
Many of those procedures are also frequently not properly documented, remaining largely in the brains of senior personnel. As the company expands, this leads to poor communication, as well as leading to a poor bus factor.
Platform engineering decreases such expenses by eliminating the roadblocks that stymie developers.
Platform Engineering vs. DevOps
Platform engineering duties should not be confused with the duties of a DevOps team. They are similar in some ways but different in others. Understanding where platform engineering & DevOps divide can help to explain why this new team is gaining popularity. For one thing, DevOps originates in platform engineering, and it has grown in tandem with technical advancement. Initially, DevOps was somewhat haphazard. For example, if a team inside a company decided to host a new website, it would need to coordinate with a DevOps team. Consider the concept of platform engineering. Platform developers create systems on which teams may build. To extend the case, if the exact team had a system that handled website hosting, there would be no need for cooperation between this team or the platform engineering team.
Another notable distinction is the function of an API limit, as well as how apparent this line is in the context of their role’s duties. This is consistent with the notion that DevOps seems to be more ad hoc than platform engineering. Platform engineering and DevOps teams are responsible for deployments, infrastructure, and service accounts. DevOps teams, on the other hand, aren’t creating platforms with explicit APIs and abstractions that provide flexibility to app developers; platform teams are.
When does a company require a platform engineering team?
When contemplating developing a platform engineering team, firms frequently evaluate tradeoffs. On the one hand, assembling a platform engineering team diverts resources away from creating business logic and functionality. On the other hand, a platform engineering team may provide tooling & infrastructure that boosts engineering productivity.
Without a platform team in existence, certain engineers may take on the position of platform engineer. Organizationally, this may be a problem as well as a burden on the engineers in a company. Rogue engineers functioning in a platform engineering role are most likely to be ineffective in the absence of a definite group of engineers accountable for an organization’s platform. Simply said, evaluating developing a platform engineering team is like comparing short-term profits versus long-term gains.
Organizations should examine the short-term costs of establishing a platform engineering team. The observation of multiple product teams implementing identical features or attempting to complete similar tasks is a strong indicator that an organization would benefit from a platform engineering team. If a platform team is created, product teams may see a productivity improvement. Platform engineering is intriguing because it has the potential to boost the efficiency of an entire business. This should be considered before dismissing the requirement for a platform engineering team.
If an enterprise has a platform team, an attempt to continue or commence cloud migration is generally unavoidable. When migrating to the Cloud, enterprises must decide which cloud provider, or vendors, to utilize.
Platform Engineering enables fast development in the Cloud
Platform engineers help protect developers from the infrastructure. They may lessen the struggles of software development by using infrastructure as code along with other methodologies and technologies, allowing developers to get their work to production faster than before.
Because platform engineering is a comparatively new concept, there is still considerable room for interpretation. The industry is still trying to figure out what platform engineering entails. One thing is certain: the importance of automation in the software development life cycle will only rise in the future. There is just no way to stay competitive in this sector unless you use all of the tools at your disposal to create a software delivery pipeline that is just as efficient and rapid as possible.
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