What is Platform Engineering?

My last topic was supposed to be Platform Engineering. However, I learnt that unless we speak about DevOps, we will not be able to understand this topic and hence, shifted this topic from last time to now.

You would have now guessed that there is some connection of Platform Engineering with DevOps. Say, your organization has moved from traditional software development to DevOps. Wow!!! All problems eliminated!!! No…. Well, new problems emerge.

How? So, what happens when you have a DevOps team. Your dependency on lot of teams gets eliminated and from entire software development to release to the client is managed by a single DevOps team and hence, software development’s speed and efficiency increases. However, will one DevOps team manage all the software development? Not practically possible. Say one team manages product X for a client A, the other team manages product B for client A and third team, product C for Client A. Or it can be one team developing a business application, another infrastructure applications and third team, say security applications. So, naturally, they will need some services from other teams that are used in their applications. And here the problem starts. The microservices get built and built and built for each team and then it becomes unmanageable.

So, one more Devops team is created who are called as Platform Engineers. What they do? They create something called as ‘Internal Developer Platform’ or IDP. What does this IDP do? It provides common services needed for each team. E.g. security, infrastructure, common codes etc. This helps to save time and effort on part of other DevOps teams as well as brings uniformity in these services as one service is used across the platforms.

Unfortunately, I guess I need to stop here. Already crossed 300 words !!!

But if you wish to know more on this, do go through this simple video. I liked it. Simple to understand. https://youtu.be/-hvA-5N9LDc?si=6j7x_3FF4vNTEbLI

Know your Basics Series – Article no. 42