What Platform Engineers Need

Platform engineers design, build, and maintain the infrastructure and tools necessary for software development and deployment. They’re often the unsung heroes behind the digital curtain, enabling infrastructure automation and providing self-service capabilities to allow developers and product teams to expedite application delivery and provide customer value faster.?

As application architectures become increasingly complex thanks to paradigms like microservices, containerization, and system distribution across different infrastructure types, platform engineers across the board face some common challenges and hurdles in ensuring developers and product owners have what they need to meet their productivity goals.?

Infrastructure Complexity

Platform engineers grapple with managing configurations and policies across diverse infrastructure types, especially in hybrid and multi-cloud architectures. With DevOps and CI/CD, they also bear the responsibility of maintaining a coherent state across different stages of development, testing, and production. Simple differences like JSON and YAML configurations can lead to inconsistencies, demanding expertise and a deep understanding of distributed systems across various environments. While implementing? Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and automation tools like Ansible can help streamline the process of repeating the same configuration steps consistently across different environments, multiple tools, strategies and best practices are involved in effective infrastructure provisioning and management, creating further challenges for the platform teams.

Tools and Technologies Sprawl

With so many platform engineering tools and technologies available in the market, choosing the right ones for particular needs and ensuring compatibility across the entire multi-cloud environments can be daunting for platform engineers. They must choose between setting up vendor-neutral technologies like Kubernetes, Terraform, GitLab, and Ansible that require in-depth knowledge of potential incompatibilities or opt for platform-specific, end-to-end solutions like GKE and AKS and AWS CloudFormation and Azure ARM templates that may be simpler to use. However, being native to particular platforms, these services may not extend to other clouds in multi-cloud deployments and can tie organizations into vendor lock-in. Therefore, it’s as crucial as it is challenging for platform engineers to weigh in the benefits and assess the compatibility of the tools they choose to avoid running into issues down the line.?

Resource Optimizations

Platform engineers are constantly juggling performance, resources, and costs across complex multi-cloud setups. They must ensure high availability and performance while staying within the resource and budget restraints. This requires maintaining tight control and monitoring across all the cloud environments involved in the different phases of deployment, such as building, testing, staging and production. Multiple monitoring tools, each dedicated to a particular cloud in a multi-cloud environment, can add to the challenges of platform engineers. They must then deal with the silos between different platforms, the visibility gaps, and the need for managing several, disparate tools. Without complete and unified visibility into resource availability and utilization across the entire multi-cloud environment, platform engineers simply do not have the knowledge needed for cost optimizations.

Scalability

Platform engineers must architect solutions that can seamlessly scale, horizontally across different regions or cloud providers based on growing demands. It involves implementing scalable infrastructure patterns with auto-scaling and load balancing capabilities that span multiple cloud environments. This can be hard to achieve as each provider has its own set of resources, data sources, and configurations specific to that provider. As such, platform engineers need to rely on tools like Terraform and Ansible to manage infrastructure and other cloud resources reliably and consistently across all clouds. While these tools provide a degree of abstraction, managing the differences between cloud providers, such as service capabilities, naming conventions, and feature variations, can still be challenging. Further abstractions and automation through cloud management platforms are paramount as manual intervention in multi-cloud scenarios can lead to errors, discrepancies and configuration drift.?

Read the full blog: https://emma.ms/blog/what-platform-engineers-need