Platform Engineering is a new subject that evolved in response to the growing complexity of systems meant to meet the criteria of Cloud Native architectures. Platform Engineering, from a methodological perspective, discusses how to create and manage an Internal Developer Platform (IDP), which is an internal business tool that serves as an abstraction layer between developers and the systems with which they interact.
How Does Platform Engineering Work?
In the DevOps era, platform engineering teams function similarly to traditional product teams. The figures typically depict a group of SREs (Site Reliability Engineers), DevOps Engineers, and Product Managers. They all collaborate to select and integrate product and technology suites, define technological and methodological approaches to solving a variety of problems that their company’s developers and architects face daily, and create workflows and logic that are appropriate for their organization.
Platform Engineering Services like any other product team, undertake market research, collect feedback from their users, and work to ensure that the Internal Developer Platform they produce is adopted internally to maximize the effect and productivity advantages across the company.
What Are The Advantages Of Platform Engineering For Companies?
A company that intends to adopt a Platform Engineering model and thus establish an in-house team of Platform Engineers can assess the success of such an initiative by tracking a number of key factors, including efficiency and cost reduction, scalability and flexibility, reliability and security, and an improved overall Developer Experience.
Efficiency and Cost Reduction
An organization that does not use DevOps and Platform Engineering has a very low level of automation. This results in a waste of resources like time, money, and talent in low-value-added tasks. Examples include
- Creating test environments.
- Preparing data.
- Enabling new cloud or infrastructure services required by the product team.
On the contrary, comprehensive automation and integration including testing will add value to business stakeholders while maintaining quality and speed. As a result, the timetable for putting new features into production will be shorter.
Scalability and Flexibility
When one thinks of scalability and flexibility, one instantly considers an application’s ability to handle big peaks or workloads. However, it is important to remember that a product team may have these demands at some point in its lifecycle. For example, with the addition of new team members, effective and quick onboarding, or the flexibility to adapt to changes in standards and operating processes practically quickly.
These challenges can be efficiently addressed by a team of platform engineers, allowing new team members to get up and running quickly with pre-installed and virtualized work environments. Alternatively, the intricacies of the underlying operational procedures or technologies can be hidden behind simpler and more intuitive ad-hoc interfaces.
Reliability And Security
Standardizing software and product development through a platform engineering team governs the frameworks, libraries, and principles used to develop software. This allows for the removal of unstable or insecure code libraries, as well as the avoidance of vital design components such as logging, telemetry, and credential management, all of which are critical for debugging application operations and decreasing the attack surface.
Platform engineering services empower developers to control the necessary infrastructure and technology. Each developer has easy access to resources and materials developed and shared inside the company such as documentation or code, allowing them to focus on their duties rather than comprehending and bureaucratizing the organizational context in which they function.
Platform engineering against DevOps.
We’ve discussed both, but what’s the difference between DevOps and Platform Engineering? They represent distinct ways to increase the productivity and efficiency of development and operational teams. Platform Engineering attempts to build flexible and scalable infrastructures to support the development of applications and services, whereas DevOps focuses on team cooperation and reducing software delivery time.
Both methodologies have advantages and disadvantages, and the decision between DevOps and Platform Engineering will be based on an organization’s specific needs and long-term goals.
A platform engineering strategy may be more beneficial to larger and more complex projects due to its increased flexibility and scalability, but a DevOps approach may suffice for smaller and less complex projects.
Furthermore, organizational culture and business objectives should be considered when making a decision: if the organization already has a strong culture of collaboration and communication among teams, DevOps may be the best option, whereas if the primary goal is to create flexible and scalable infrastructures to support future growth, Platform Engineering may be the best approach.
Benefits of Platform Engineering in Business Upscaling
Let’s dive in and look at how Platform Engineering is enabling firms to scale swiftly in terms of technology and infrastructure.
- Faster App Deployment: Platform engineering services accelerate application development and delivery, as well as the rate at which business value is delivered. Automated processes and self-service infrastructure enable organizations to keep up with the features that are most important to their business and market needs. It lets organizations respond swiftly to market demands, capitalize on new possibilities, and stay ahead of the competition. Modular and flexible architectures enable organizations to easily and efficiently add and remove components and grow their technology infrastructure.
- Improving Productivity: Platform Engineering reduces the cognitive load on developers, allowing them to focus on their primary activities of designing apps, providing customer value, and driving business outcomes. The Platform Engineering team develops and maintains Internal Developer Platforms (IDP), toolchains, underlying infrastructures, and procedures to help engineers build and deliver stable, adaptable, and scalable software applications.
- Cloud-Native Technologies: Platform Engineering is an effective method for scaling up software delivery processes while maintaining quality, security, and efficiency. It takes advantage of cloud-native technology to let organizations scale up or down their IT resources as needed. The Platform Engineering team’s reliance on Cloud systems enables it to facilitate application development and heavy workloads while maintaining the necessary performance requirements.
- Providing Modular and Scalable Architecture: The Platform Engineering Services focuses on creating a modular and scalable architecture that serves as the foundation for product development and deployment. These scalable solutions allow developers to send new code to production more frequently and reliably while maintaining overall system stability.
Also Read:- Why Engineering Consultation is Crucial for Modern Industry?
Conclusion
Platform engineering has the potential to be a competitive advantage. Companies can use platform engineering to improve the effectiveness of their software development, release, and evolution processes while maintaining software quality, security, and efficiency. Setting up specialized Platform Engineering Services whose mission is to automate and raise the efficiency of internal teams allows you to shorten the time it takes to offer value to your users with new features and updates.
