I spent several years working in a platform team, and I was really surprised by hype around the field over past year. So I decided to understand why platform engineering has become so popular and what is really meant under that nowadays.
According to Wikipedia:
Platform engineering is a software engineering discipline that focuses on building toolchains and self-service workflows for the use of developers. Platform engineering is about creating a shared platform for software engineers using computer code.
Sounds simple. But what problem does it solve?
Over the last 2-3 decades, the complexity of software development significantly increased. Developers should understand CI\CD pipelines, know how to work with Kubernetes and its components, integrate with public cloud services, incorporate scaling strategies and observability tools. This complexity increases cognitive load and slows down the delivery of business features. Introducing dedicated platform teams should help shift the focus of product and delivery teams back to implementing business features.
So what platform teams actually do (of course, nobody can do everything and specialization is required):
✏️ Help developers to be self-sufficient: prepare started kits, IDE plugins, "golden path" templates and docs, self-service APIs
✏️ Encapsulate common patterns and practices into reusable building blocks: identity and secret management, messaging, data services (including databases, caches and object storages), observability tools, dashboards and code instrumentation approach
✏️ Automate build and test processes for products and services
✏️ Automate delivery and security verification processes for products and services
✏️ Accumulate expertise about underlying tools and services, optimize their usage
✏️ Provide early advice and feedback on problems or security risks
Platform engineering principles:
✏️ Adopt a product mindset: take ownership of the platform, make it attractive for developers to use
✏️ Focus on user experience
✏️ Make platform services optional and composable: allow product teams to use only the parts of the platform, or replace them with their own solutions when necessary.
✏️ Provide self-service experience with guardrails: empower development teams to make their own decisions within a set of well-defined parameters
✏️ Improve discovery of available tools, patterns and templates
✏️ Enforce automation and everything as a code approach
Since the publication of the CNCF Platform White Paper in 2023, the popularity of platform engineering is still growing. In 2024, there was even a dedicated conference—Platform Conf' 24—highlighting huge interest and importance of the discipline.
Summing up, platform engineering is a powerful pattern to reduce cognitive complexity of application development, speed up business features development, and provide a more reliable and scalable infrastructure.
References:
- CNCF Platforms White Paper
- Google Cloud: How to Become a Platform Engineer
- Microsoft: What is Platform Engineering
#engineering