Platform engineering has become a hot topic for modern software development. Some claim it’s the replacement for DevOps or that “DevOps” is dead. It’s essential, however, to realize that platform engineering is not a replacement for DevOps but rather an evolution built on the core DevOps philosophies
This article will take a closer view of platform engineering. We will explore platform engineering and then break it into its standard components. You’ll understand why platform engineering is the next step in providing modern application infrastructure.
What is platform engineering
First, let’s talk about a common scenario in modern software engineering. Most teams build, deploy and manage their application infrastructure themselves, often with the assistance of a primary cloud provider. This means there is plenty of documentation and tools, and the knowledge transfer for newbies doesn’t have to be painful. This is a perfect example of DevOps, where developers and operations are blended: rainbows and happiness.
This approach has its challenges. The developers are suddenly saddled with extra responsibilities such as operations, infrastructure, and security. Bugs and technical debt are the results!
It’s essential for developers to be familiar with these domains. However, the primary role of a software developer is to develop software. The DevOps philosophy is not if you get bogged down with infrastructure management.
Enter platform engineering. This approach involves a central team managing a shared infrastructure across all development teams. This allows developers to focus on their main tasks, like feature development, and not worry about infrastructure management. Platform team will take care of operational and security issues, ensuring that the infrastructure is available, secure and scalable while software engineers concentrate on their applications.
This is a win-win situation that will ensure faster delivery of new software features and a better overall quality.
Automation and Infrastructure as Code
Infrastructure as Code is essential for platform engineering teams when it comes to managing infrastructure on a large scale. IaC has become a necessity for most internet-facing apps, given the scale required. Manually provisioning resources through the console is fine if you are testing a small number of compute nodes. But it won’t work when you have to scale up and down thousands of nodes to meet user demand.
IaC is only one part of a larger operational paradigm. Terraform, one of the most popular IaC tool, can be configured and run on a single computer. This approach, like click-based provisionsing, will not scale. Terraform offers a number of automation features which can be used with CI/CD infrastructure. Platform engineers are usually more numerous than software engineers. They need to maximize their resources to manage at scale. Automating linting and testing can improve reliability and security.
Containerization and orchestration
Containers have revolutionized modern software development. Containers are a great way to create platform-independent build artifacts.
Containers ensure consistency across development stages by bundling dependencies and applications into isolated environments. This is important for ensuring reliable and stable deployments, which is one of 12 factor app development’s key elements. The uniformity simplifies both the development process as well as the management of the application infrastructure. It’s also much easier to troubleshoot issues when they do occur because the infrastructure is identical.
Containers help engineering teams get closer to reproducible builds. A Dockerfile can build the same container for any machine. Containers are a blessing for platform engineers that need to support multiple teams and systems. They offer a standard build artifact which can be deployed across all applications.
Container orchestration tools like Kubernetes are essential for managing and scaling containerized applications. Kubernetes is the most popular container orchestration tool for platform engineering teams. If you plan to support multiple software systems that are built using containers, an orchestration platform will be necessary.
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
CI/CD provides the automation needed to deliver software at scale. This is an important practice for any software engineering company, but platform engineering is particularly critical because it allows infrastructure management to be more efficient and reliable.
CI/CD in platform engineering is crucial to keep the shared infrastructure platform secure, up-to-date, and reliable. Platform engineers can quickly implement new features, bug fixes, and improvements by automating code changes. They also run automated tests to validate the changes and deploy the updated applications in the appropriate environments. It minimizes disruptions for development teams who rely on the platforms, while also ensuring any potential issues are identified early in the process. Platform teams can also easily share the same CI/CD process with development teams. This eliminates the need to reinvent deployment automation.
Monitoring and observability
Modern software applications can benefit greatly from monitoring, especially observability. It allows platform and development teams to gain insight into the performance and health of systems. As distributed, complex architectures become more common, the importance of observability for monitoring, troubleshooting and optimizing software applications has increased.
Two reasons make robust instrumentation important in a platform environment:
For platform:Each developer within the organization is the customer. Platform engineers must maintain platform uptime to ensure a seamless developer experience.
Developers need to know the health and performance status of applications that are hosted on the platform. Platform teams will have to create the interfaces for them to receive and output data.
Basic resource metrics such as CPU and RAM usage sufficed to understand system health and behavior in simpler legacy architectures. These metrics are not enough to tell the full story in modern distributed systems, such as those found within a platform. It is crucial to understand the entire lifecycle of user request, the impact of changes on the environment, and the behavior of discrete applications and services within the larger stack. Platform engineers should have this data for themselves, and give development teams the same access.
