Platform Engineering - What It is, Its Hype, Industry Pace, & More

Platform engineering, rooted in DevOps principles, improves security, compliance, costs, and time-to-business value by prioritizing developer experience and self-service within a secure, managed framework. It combines a product-based mentality change with a set of tools and processes to enable it. The phrase platform engineering has recently gained popularity in the business.

These teams are responsible for developing what is known as the internal developer platform. Platforms are meant to attain scale and shorten the time it takes to deliver business value, regardless of domain - sales (for example, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce), service fulfillment (for example, ServiceNow), or communications (for example, Twilio).

Platforms that developers use or enhance may reduce effort throughout the development process by optimizing developer experiences and simplifying processes. These systems have tools that:

• Assist developers in becoming self-sufficient (for example, starting kits, IDE plugins)
• Assist with routine tasks
• Capture common patterns and practices into reusable building components
• Offer early advice and feedback on faults or security threats
• Manage the underlying infrastructure and tools to make operations simpler

The Importance of Platform Engineering

Internal developer platforms (IDPs) increase team velocity and satisfaction by enabling developer self-service and decreasing cognitive strain. It has the potential to impose design standards, boost developer productivity, and improve developer experience. They also boost the organization's productivity and performance on important DevOps metrics such as mean time to recovery (MTTR) and Change Failure Rate. Internal developer platforms also increase deployment frequency and shorten lead times for software development.

What Is The Definition of an Internal Developer Platform (IDP)?

An IDP is the collection of technologies and tools that a platform engineering team brings together to construct golden pathways and allow developer self-service. IDPs decrease ticket operations, standardize configuration settings, shorten lead times and time to market, among other things. Well-designed IDPs use a platform as a product strategy, in which a dedicated platform team creates, maintains, and constantly improves the IDP.

How Platform Engineering Works

A platform team consists of chosen SREs, DevOps engineers, and product managers. They work together to tackle common challenges throughout the enterprise and combine toolchains and workflows into easy-to-follow golden pathways. The result of their efforts is an Internal Developer Platform or an integrated offering that addresses the operational requirements of the full application lifecycle.

There are three major pillars of platform engineering:

• Improve the developer experience by creating internal developer platforms that decrease cognitive strain, developer toil, and repetitive manual effort.
• Platforms do not impose a certain toolset or strategy. It is about making it simple for developers to create and distribute applications without abstracting away important and distinctive features from the underlying core services.
• Platform engineering teams see platforms as products (used by developers) and build them for self-service consumption.

The platform engineering team operates as a product team. It performs user research, develops a product roadmap, solicits frequent input, iterates, and advertises the Internal Developer Platform internally to its target audience: developers. The product strategy guarantees that the Internal Developer Platform satisfies the demands of its users and that it is widely embraced throughout the business.

Initiate Your Platform Engineering Efforts

As platform engineering gains popularity, more businesses are looking for information and best practices for platforming their systems. And you too can achieve this with the partnership of an expert out there.