An Overview Of Platform Engineering
What is Platform Engineering?
Platform engineering is a new discipline that has emerged in response to the growing complexity of our modern day Cloud-native architectures. It can be called as a practice of building and maintaining an integrated product, which we call as “Internal Developer Platform” (IDP) ,which acts as a flexible and supported abstraction layer between developers and the underlying technologies of their applications.
Platform engineering is a process or an art that combines several tools and technologies which streamlines the software development and delivery process and help decrease the mental load on individual contributors, enabling self-service platforms for developers and other staeholders.
Platform engineers bring the necessary tools for deploying and running applications and formalize their usage across the entire team. In other terms, platform engineering encompasses everything that is a part of the application’s non-functional requirements.
A platform engineer’s responsibilities are to organize, create, and maintain the infrastructure that supports the DevOps of software applications. Nowadays, platform engineering is becoming a trend because it guarantees to provide the best experience for developers and speeds up the product team. They also help developers work more efficiently by implementing CI/CD pipelines and configuring IaC (Infrastructure as Code) to automate cloud resources.
Image Credit: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2020/02/13/setting-the-stage-for-platform-engineering/
The above images show how both platform engineering and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) are properly suited for the development team. Once these tools receive more features, application developers must work on these features. Subsequently, both the platform engineering team and the Infrastructure as Code team collaborate.
Who is a Platform Engineer?
A platform engineer’s responsibility is to build the tools needed in the development and operations process for organizing, executing & managing the infrastructure. These engineers also work at the junction of IT operations & software development, concentrating on developing an automated workflow to help the develeopers, sysadmins, security teams and other stakeholders with a se
Platform engineers have to work with software developers, stakeholders, and system administrators to get to know their needs and secure them to fulfill their needs with the help of tools and platforms.
The platform engineer’s responsibilities depends upon the need of the organization, and some of the common responsibilities may include:
IMAGE CREDIT: https://www.spiceworks.com/tech/it-careers-skills/articles/platform-engineer-job-role/#lg=1&slide=0
Responsibilities Of a Platform Engineer
A Platform engineer have several responsibilities. He will discuss challenges with the developers and then act upon their insights to build internal tools and platforms.
- They have to design, do testing & deployment of the software.
- They do automate the application deployment process.
- They are mostly involved in building internal developer portals (IDPs). IDPs provide a curated set of tools, capabilities and processes.
- Platform engineer is involved in maintaining and updating infrastructure and applications
- Platform engineers have to collaborate and work with other team like Operations, Development & Security to provide flow going integrations.
- At the time of any issue and problems , platform engineer try to solve it.
- They have to keep up with the latest trends in the industry.
Principles Of Platform Engineering
Some of the Key principles of Platform engineering are shared below.
Developer-Centric Philosophy(Empowering the Developers)
One of the most important principle and the main reason for the existence of the platform engineering teams is to make the life of developers easy. They collaborate with the developers, understand their pain-points and then work to build a frictionless internal developer portals (IDPs), that is an internal tool or platform to solve some of the developer challenges within.
Building Resilience and Anti-fragility
Another core principle for Platform enigneering is Resilience. In case of major issues or chaos, a modern Platform team not only survives, but thrives.Antifragility takes it a step further, transforming disruptions into opportunities for improvement. Modern platform engineering employs strategies such as redundancy, graceful degradation, and fault tolerance to build systems that flourish under pressure.
Automation
As the name says automation principles mean to automate manual and repetitive tasks like testing, evaluating, deployment, etc. It also enhances to decrease human mistakes, speeds up software delivery & improves the efficiency. Automation is the fundamental principle of platform engineering that consist the utilization of scripting and technology to perform the repetitive tasks and streamline process.
Standardization
Standardization maintain the consistency, helps to facilitates alliance across the team, decreases elaborateness. Standardization also provide the best practices, and coding structure. Other important principle of platform engineering, it helps to assure the reliability, consistency for organizing infrastructure and help the team of software development. To configure the standardized security help to protect against vulnerabilities and assure all the problem related to industry regulations.
Modularity
The principle of designing and making a software platforms is nothing but a collection of loosely coupled and independent code modules.Here each module serves a specific purpose which can be developed, tested, and deployed independently. The principle of Modularity enhances flexibility, reusability, and scalability, allowing for easier maintenance, upgrades, and adaption to changing requirements.
Scalability
Another key principle of platform engineering is Scalability. It can be defined as the ability of a platform or a tool to handle increased workloads, traffic, users, and data volumes without giving up on the performance.Platform engineering helps develop a scalable architecture or infrastructure that can scale down or up efficiently.
Security
Platform Engineers are also responsible to secure developer code, infrastructure ,data and other resources. Implementing robust security measures can protect the platform, application, and user data from breaches, any unauthorized and unwanted access, and other vulnerabilities.
Collaboration
The platform engineering process also emphasizes on the collaboration between Platform engineers, Developers, Operation teams, and other stakeholders involved in the project.
Skills Required For a Platform Engineer
If you want to become a successful Platform engineer, it’s important to have some key skills and some of the common skills are communication skills, analytical skills, innovation skills, collaborative teamwork skills & the last not least is trouble solving skills.
- Good coding skills
- Creativity and problem-solving skills
- Analytical skills
- Excellent Communication skills:Excellent written, verbal, and presentation skills to plainly and concisely articulate technical concepts.
- Research and innovation skills
- Good at cross team collaboration
- Working under tight timelines and ability to perform and deliver
Benefits Of Platform Engineering
Increased Efficiency
The entire process of platform engineering is automated, focusing on automation. Before the platform engineer’s involvement, the work was manually managing the cloud infrastructure and creating CI/CD pipelines, which consumed significant time and resulted in numerous errors. Therefore, the platform engineer enables more efficient work with fewer errors.
Cost Optimization
Many platform engineers handle cloud services with a “pay as you use” model, which means organizations only pay for the services they use. Platform engineering facilitates cost optimization through automation, efficient resource allocation, and payment based on actual usage of cloud services. This approach helps organizations save money while ensuring reliable and scalable applications.
Improved Security
Platform engineering employs several techniques to enhance security, including monitoring and logging systems to detect suspicious activities, providing security training and attention, securing container environments, and ensuring the security of code pipelines and applications.
Increased velocity
Platform engineering exponentially cuts down on the time it takes for developers to get up and running in the cloud.
Conclusion
There is no denying fact that Platform engineering is the latest buzz in the technology space and the future also looks bright. The image below shows Gartner’s Hype cycle for Emerging Tech for 2022, and Platform engineerings seems to be there fo rat-leasst next 5 years or more.
IMAGE CREDIT : https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/what-s-new-in-the-2022-gartner-hype-cycle-for-emerging-technologies
So if someone is looking to pursue a career in Platform engineer then they can definitely choose it to make a successful and rewarding career option out of it. This role is nowdays becoming moe and more popular and many organizations gobally are hiring Platform engineers for the enhancement and company growth. It is a combination of tools and technology that decreases the mental pressure on individual contributors, enabling self-service for developers.
Hence we can conclude on the note that the demand for Platform engineers is rising and Platform engineering as a concept is here to stay for long.
