Remember those times when the software team within your enterprise had to build its own delivery infrastructure? That fragmented, DIY era is almost over, all thanks to platform engineering. It is revolutionising the way companies ship software. Shifting from toolchains to curated, internal developer platforms.
Research confirms that 55% of organisations across the globe have already adopted it. 85% report their developers now rely on the platform to succeed. But still, its power is unknown to many. So:
– What exactly is it?
– How does it relate to DevOps?
– What tools fuel it?
In this blog, API Connects – data engineering services in New Zealand – will answer such questions about platform engineering. We will provide you with the clarity you need to evaluate this transformative force and accelerate your development velocity.
For those in a rush, here’s a quick version:
Frequently Asked Platform Engineering Questions
What is platform engineering?
It is the science of constructing in-house platforms for developers. These platforms offer self-service to standardize and automate software delivery.
What are its key benefits for enterprises?
It radically increases the speed, productivity, and joy of developers. For enterprises, this translates to quicker market rollouts, stronger security, and clear ROI.
How is it different from DevOps?
Platform engineering is natural evolution of DevOps principles. It productizes those ideas into a concrete self-service platform that is used by developers daily. Making them practical.
Which are the best platform engineering tools?
Mandatory ones are:
– Backstage (developer portal)
– Humanitec (platform orchestrator)
– Terraform (IaC)
– Argo CD (continuous delivery)
– Kubernetes (container orchestration)
– GitHub Actions (continuous integration)
– Grafana and Prometheus (observability)
Why hire specialized platform engineers of API Connects in NZ?
We have special ability to productize infrastructure. Our engineers deeply understands developers needs. Collaborating with us means you will be able to create a scalable platform that functions well right from the beginning.
Alright, let’s understand its meaning first.
What is Platform Engineering?
A modern software engineering discipline, platform engineering focuses on designing, building, and managing shared infrastructure – internal developer platform (IDP). It provides self-service capabilities to development teams. No more managing the complex infrastructure directly.
Developers can use the platform independently. They can reliably provision resources, deploy application and manage lifecycle. All within a governed framework.
What are Its Benefits for Enterprises?
Platform engineering makes enterprises structured and less chaotic by converting infrastructure chaos into a developer-friendly approach. Think of it as taking a break from fractured, DIY methodology. It enables businesses to have concrete, competitive advantages.
The main advantages of platform engineering for enterprises are:
Better development speed and market agility: It eliminates manual gates and frictions by developing automated golden paths for deployment. You’ll notice a drastic effect on lead time for changes (time between the code commit and production). It will be much less.
Companies can deliver features and respond to the markets with simply phenomenal speed.
Supercharged developer productivity and morale: A developer-friendly platform is a self-service layer, which takes up agonising infrastructure tasks. With platform engineering, developers gain independence in provisioning of resources. They can release code in a couple of clicks without having to stand in queues and complex configurations.
This decrease in cognitive load leads to higher satisfaction which directly increases retention and attraction of talents.
Reliable and scalable growth: Platform engineering consolidates and standardises the tooling and procedures for the whole engineering organisation. It provides a stabilised, managed base that new teams can immediately utilise.
Onboarding time can be reduced to several days rather than weeks. Your business can easily scale its engineering power without compromising its stability or quality.
Makes security and governance proactive: Security is no more final gatekeeper. Rather, it is shifted left and gets integrated into automated workflows within the platform itself. Compliance audits, vulnerability scans, access policies – these become implicit invisible guardrails.
This dramatically shrinks the attack surface and compliance overhead by avoiding problems instead of dealing with them.
Measurable business value and ROI: And here comes the ultimate benefit of platform engineering – translating technical victories into financial impact. The result of having a mature platform is that it reduces the time to market regarding revenue-generating features and results in high-cost efficiency in the cloud due to automated management of resources.
Leaders can directly connect platform investments with strategic business outcomes by monitoring metrics like deployment frequency and change failure rate.
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What’s The DevOps vs Platform Engineering Angle?
A lot of developers and enterprises think that platform engineering will replace DevOps. Not really, it’s actually natural evolution. A powerful enabler. One should view it as operationalising DevOps principles into a concrete, self-service product for development teams.
Don’t get it? Here’s how it builds upon and differs from foundation DevOps approach:
From shared responsibility to curated product
DevOps advocates a culture of shared responsibility in which builders and operators work together. Platform engineering takes this a step ahead with responsibility of productizing it.
It establishes a dedicated, internal platform team that develops and supports a curated suite of tools (Internal Developer Platform) as a service for the organisation. The emphasis is no longer on promoting the idea of collaboration but on the engineered product that makes things easy.
Cultural advocacy to engineered enablement
DevOps is essentially a cultural or philosophical movement for eliminating silos. Although successful, it is usually based on advocacy and alignment of manual process. Platform engineering puts these cultural ideals into concrete and coded solutions.
It engineers guardrails, automation, and self-service capabilities. Making the DevOps way of working the default, repeatable way for all developers.
Toolchain flexibility to golden paths
Within a DevOps model, it is common to pick tools for each team. On the surface, it might look fine. In reality, it results in sprawling, a complex toolchain sprawl. Platform engineering proposes curated golden paths. A collection of agreed, standardised, and automated application workflows for building, deployment and observability processes.
It minimises the load on cognition, guarantees consistency, and offers a balance between developers’ freedom and organisational governance.
You build it, you run it to you build it, we provide highway
Sure, the traditional DevOps principle of “You build it, you run it” is empowering to teams but it can also overwhelm them with deep operational know-how. Platform engineering restates this to “you build it, we give you the highway”.
The platform team will deal with underlying, complicated infrastructure, networking, and security foundations. This approach provides developers with a smooth highway to production so they can emphasise application logic and user value.
Generic practices to context-specific abstraction
DevOps offers terrific generic practices (CI/CD, IaC) but teams still need to learn how to apply them to their tech stack and business context. Platform engineering develops deliberate abstractions specific to the company. It conceals the unwanted infrastructure complexity and only shows knobs and levers that matter.
Best practice is made available to all developers, irrespective of their ops expertise.
Measuring success from process to developer experience
When it comes to measuring success, process metrics like deployment frequency are commonly used for DevOps. Platform engineering uses a product manager mindset. In it, success is measured via lens of the developer as the customer.
The most important metrics include platform adoption rate, ticket deflection (fewer ops requests), developer satisfaction with platform (Dx), and time needed for successful initial deployment. These enable the platform to actively reduce toil and enhance productivity.
What are the Best Platform Engineering Tools?
Now that you’re aware of the meaning, benefits, and differences of platform engineering from DevOps, it’s time to discuss the tools that enterprises can use for building effective IDP.
Here, we’ve prepared a list of some essential tools. Each chosen for its industry traction and particular role in empowering developers and platform teams:
Backstage (developer portal)
Backstage is a Spotify-built open-source framework that allows building internal developer portals. You can use it as the front office to your IDP. The platform engineering tool offers a central catalog of services where developers will find, administer and run all their software and documentation.
Its deep ecosystem of plugins provides a high level of flexibility. However, Backstage needs a lot of engineering effort to configure and tailor.
Humanitec (platform orchestrator)
Next up on our list is Humanitec. A major Platform Orchestrator made to serve as the backend brain of IDP. It uses a graph-based model to generalize underlying infrastructure complexity.
Just declaratively define what you require (say, database) and Humanitec will dynamically create and coordinate all the settings of your toolchain. Exercising standardization and simplifying workflows.
Terraform (IaC)
Terraform is the most popular Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool (according to 71 % of surveyed platform teams). It enables platform engineers to specify and deploy cloud resources (like network and databases) through declarative configuration files.
This facilitates a consistent, version-controlled and reusable infrastructure. Forming automated foundation for self-service capabilities within the IDP.
Argo CD (continuous delivery)
How could we not talk about Argo CD? Highly preferred GitOps-based continuous delivery systems toolkit to Kubernetes. What’s special about this platform engineering tool is that it automatically reconciles the state of applications that run in your clusters with the statements that are in your Git repository.
Anything goes out of the desired state? Don’t worry, it will be auto-remediated by Argo CD. The tool offers a trustworthy, auditable, and declarative deployment management provision at scale.
Kubernetes (container orchestration)
Most modern IDPs are based on Kubernetes as the core container orchestration platform. It is a tool that uses automation to deploy, scale, and manage containerised applications. Kubernetes services give platform teams the ability to provide developers with a consistent development to production environment by exposing a powerful and mobile abstraction of compute resources.
GitHub Actions (continuous integration)
GitHub Actions is an effective CI/CD and automation platform built directly into GitHub. Using it, teams can automate workflows of building, testing and packaging by defining pipelines as code in their repositories.
Because of its easy integration with the prevailing version control system, GitHub Actions becomes a natural option for automatingthe integration phase of software lifecycle.
Grafana and Prometheus (observability)
At last, we have Prometheus and Grafana. The combo is great for platform observability. Prometheus does an excellent job in collecting real-time metrics and systems health monitoring, particularly in Kubernetes.
Grafana offer dashboards to visualise these metrics, logs, and traces. Giving developers and platform engineers vital insights about the application’s performance and system reliability.
Hire Best Platform Engineers in New Zealand
There you go!
We answered all crucial questions related to platform engineering. We understand completely capitilizing on this strategic advantage won’t be easy. You can’t handle things on your own. How about hiring the best platform engineers in New Zealand?
API Connects can design, build, and manage your internal developer platform. Using years of experience, our platform engineers can translate principles into a robust, self-service system your developers can count on to succeed.
We use trusted, vendor-agnostic technology solutions for New Zealand enterprises. Advisory and design to building and supporting scalable, automated environments – we will make sure you can accelerate your digital transformation with confidence.
Call us today on 092430360 to discuss your platform engineering goals!
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