Beyond DevOps: How Platform Engineering Transforms Digital Ecosystems

As the tech revolution gathers pace, the trends toward short project times and democratizing technology are fueling a shift away from conventional DevOps toward platform engineering. It’s not that DevOps is losing relevance; what we’re seeing is a change in how DevOps is used – a change shaped by today’s market and its shorter project times.?

Platform engineering certainly holds considerable potential: By 2026, Gartner expects 80% of large software development organizations to establish teams dedicated to the approach . Their role: To act as internal providers of reusable services, components, and tools for application delivery. Ultimately, the aim of platform engineering is to resolve the pivotal issue of collaboration between software developers and operators.?

Platform Engineering 101?

In essence, platform engineering is about using prebuilt tools to create a standardized foundation on which developers can build, evaluate, and deploy applications – instead of starting from scratch with each and every new project.?

By centralizing essential services such as authentication, database management, deployment pipelines, and monitoring, platform engineering lightens the load on development teams, allowing them to focus on tasks that deliver genuine project value – for example, by providing Golden Pathways .???

The overarching goal of the approach is twofold: first, to meet the growing complexity of distributed software development; and secondly, to provide centralized tools and support to reduce the complexity of development lifecycles and boost developer productivity . ?

The Benefits of Platform Engineering…?

Let’s take a closer look at some of the advantages that platform engineering offers. By freeing staff from time-consuming repetitive chores, the approach improves productivity , allowing developers to concentrate on building features, rather than handling infrastructure, integrations, and deployment processes.?

Another benefit of platform engineering is faster time to market . Automated testing, security checks, and deployment accelerate the process, enabling companies to stay ahead of the competition.?

What’s more, platform engineering helps ensure consistency across projects. This not only reduces the risk of errors and technical debt, but also enables maintenance, automation , higher quality, and better control in the long term.? And finally, platform engineering fosters closer collaboration, creating a culture of knowledge sharing and collective problem-solving.??

…and the Challenges?

Whether you can actually reap these benefits depends on the size of your enterprise . One crucial factor here is headcount: The efficiency of platform engineering is greater in larger enterprises, which have more teams, resources, and projects than their smaller counterparts.?

Additionally, you should be aware that, since platform engineering calls for close collaboration between teams and a shared mindset, it entails a significant cultural shift. And there are also potential risks – for example, platform lock-in: Just as companies can become too dependent on one third-party vendor’s solutions so they can become overly reliant on their own internal platforms.?

Finally, you should consider that traditional ticket-based shared services aren’t a viable option for achieving standardization and efficiency. In platform engineering, these are delivered via self-service platforms with shared applications and tools, which can be used to trigger standardized automated workflows. ?

Platform Engineering: Core Components ?

Adopting platform engineering fundamentally transforms companies’ approach to software development. Each of the core components of the approach has a part to play in this transformation.?

Automated infrastructure plays a key role in platform engineering. Platforms often incorporate infrastructure as code (IaC) tools. These not only accelerate infrastructure setup; they also ensure that environments are consistent across development, staging, and production. ?

The microservices architecture breaks down large applications into smaller, modular application services, enabling delivery of smaller, more scalable applications. ?

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines are integral to platform engineering. The combination of automated testing and deployment pipelines enables developers to push their changes quickly and confidently.?

Monitoring delivers visibility into system performance, helping developers rapidly identify and resolve issues and maintain high reliability. And by deploying standardized security policies, automated scans, and compliance checks, platform engineering helps ensure application security.?

A Real-Life Example: Platform Engineering at Accenture?

A recent Accenture case study illustrates the tangible benefits of embracing platform engineering. Accenture’s legacy analytics platform was becoming obsolete, making it difficult to keep pace with tech advances. In addition, developers had to contend with a steep learning curve and spent most of their time on operations and maintenance, rather than on generating business insights.?

To master these challenges, Accenture decided to support its IT strategy of being platform powered by moving to Google Cloud’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model. Accenture adopted a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) model, where they can build, operate, and run their own environments and services. This allows teams to use repeatable infrastructure deployments, avoid manual configuration, and introduce greater consistency, compliance monitoring and higher security standards. ?

The new PaaS approach has delivered impressive results – making over 400TB of business data available to Accenture. What’s more, it executes high-volume queries up to six times faster than the legacy solution. And it has brought a 90% reduction in operational incidents in production environments.???

The Future of Platform Engineering?

Given its vast potential, it’s no surprise than platform engineering is rapidly becoming established as a new profession – and one that pays significantly higher salaries than those commanded by traditional DevOps engineers (9.4% more in north America and as much as 19.4% higher in Europe). ?

As the next step in the evolution of DevOps, platform engineering places even clearer emphasis on the cross-functional role of developers – resulting in a fundamental reorientation of the developer role throughout the software life cycle. ?

Over to You??

Want to find out more about platform engineering and whether it could be the right fit for your organization? Then feel free to reach out to me. And if you have your own success stories around this highly appealing new approach, let us know about them in the comments below.?