Platform Engineering: Keys to improve productivity in your company

In such a fast-paced digital environment, organizations face a multitude of challenges that can hinder their ability to deliver software efficiently and mindfully.

Platform engineering is a discipline within software development that focuses on improving productivity, application cycle time, and speed to market. Throughout the article, we will explore its secrets, advantages, examples, and the keys to getting the most out of it in your company.

What is Platform Engineering

Platform engineering is a practice based on DevOps principles, which seeks to improve security, compliance, cost, and time-to-value for each development team through enhanced experiences and self-service within a secure and governed framework, according to Microsoft.

This could be defined as a change in mindset based on the product and a set of tools and systems that support it.

It reduces complexity by providing standardized self-service tools and automated workflows, which helps minimize errors and allows developers to work more efficiently within a secure and governed framework. By keeping these environments stable, platform engineering enables developers to focus on innovation while accelerating product delivery, improving security and facilitating scalability.

For all these reasons, platform engineering is especially important in cloud-native environments, where a scalable and resilient infrastructure is crucial. Through Infrastructure as Code (IaC), this practice automates infrastructure management and configuration, improving operational efficiency, security, and compliance.

It is built on three fundamental principles:

• Scalability: highlights a platform’s ability to efficiently handle growing workloads, ensuring that applications can scale as user demand increases.
• Reliability: focuses on the consistency and reliability of an internal platform, which aims to ensure that internal vendors and experienced developers can rely on the platform to deliver customer value on an ongoing basis.
• Automation: is fundamental to modern platform operations, as it prioritizes the reduction of manual work, as well as the integration of sophisticated platform tools and DevOp toolchainss.

Benefits of Platform Engineering

As we have discussed above, platform engineering offers numerous benefits, such as:

• Accelerated time to market: Its automation and self-service capabilities speed up the development process and enable faster delivery.
• Increased productivity: The use of reusable tools and automated workflows fosters a product mentality, allowing developers to focus on writing code and building features rather than dealing with infrastructure and tooling issues.
• Consistent and standardized environments: Uniform tools and processes help ensure consistency across development environments, reducing variability and potential conflicts.
• Efficient operations: Use of this practice automates infrastructure management and orchestration, reducing complexity for developers, operations teams and DevOps, facilitating continuous integration.
• Improved developer experience: Significantly improves the developer experience by reducing cognitive load and streamlining workflow, allowing professionals to focus on programming rather than infrastructure management.
• Enhanced security and compliance: Integrated security practices and compliance measures use open source solutions to develop applications that comply with industry standards.
• Proactive responsiveness: Active monitoring, performance metrics, and data-driven improvements enable teams to quickly address issues and bottlenecks, resulting in an optimized development environment.
• Superior quality: Process optimization allows developers to spend more time on core projects, perform extensive testing, and meet higher standards.
• Scalable and flexible solutions: platforms are created that allow for seamless deployment and upgrades, which are capable of handling larger workloads.

Platform Engineering vs DevOps

Both platform engineering and DevOps are IT practices that use agile software development methodologies to reduce time to release and mitigate barriers to development.

While similar in many ways, they also have differences, with each practice emerging at a different time and focusing on a different set of problems. DevOps, on the other hand, is an approach to software development that organizations use to combine development and IT operations functions into iterative workflows. Whereas platform engineering focuses more on creating the internal platforms and tools that support those workflows.

In fact, platform engineering facilitates DevOps scalability, as DevOps teams don’t have to do everything themselves. It thus helps to establish a set of standardized tools, knowledge, services, and processes that can serve many development teams in the organization.

With selected platforms, development teams can build, deploy, own, and support their components, while the platform team builds, deploys, owns, and supports the platform components. This is very useful, as it allows both teams to focus their efforts and streamline deliveries.

In fact, platform teams have the potential to reduce redundancy and duplication of effort, which can waste time for the organization as a whole. Multiple development teams can use a self-service platform rather than each creating their own platform with the same functionality. This maintains consistency over time, even when the existing development team is no longer in charge of the current project.

Platform Engineering Examples

Implementing a successful platform engineering strategy takes effort, but the rewards are worth it, as small teams can support thousands of developers and hundreds of projects.

However, creating an internal platform for developers is a process, so apply a product mentality that considers developers, ML professionals, or data scientists as customers. Each company is unique, so consider the specific needs of internal customers to chart a progressive path through this process.

Platform engineering is becoming increasingly crucial as it alleviates the infrastructure concerns of developers. Whereas in the past, developers had to find or develop their own tools, this has now become impossible due to the increasing complexity of the technology.

These constant challenges cause them to spend a lot of time learning and integrating, which diverts their attention from core responsibilities such as product improvement and meeting business objectives. Platform engineering solves these problems by providing a standardized, self-service infrastructure and automated workflows, resulting in innovation and productivity.

At Plain Concepts we help our clients achieve a scalable and efficient infrastructure and give them the tools they need to meet their demands, improving operational efficiency and shortening time to market. We will also provide integrated security practices and automated checks and balances to ensure that both infrastructure and applications meet the most stringent security and compliance standards in the industry. What are you waiting for to contact us?