Rapid delivery, especially in the software industry, has always been one of the crucial success factors. One of the biggest problems with monolithic apps was the time it took to get new builds or features to production. For quite a while, the most popular solution to this and many other problems was the DevOps approach to software development. However, recently, it has evolved into a new form: platform engineering, sometimes seen as a whole new discipline. Platform engineering is gaining popularity at an impressive rate and is often mentioned as a contender to DevOps.
Both DevOps and platform engineering aim to enable software engineers to do their work better, creating high-quality apps and taking them to production faster. So is there any real difference between the two? Let's find out.
Main principles of DevOps
The DevOps approach to software development has been around for quite a while, so you have probably heard a lot about it already, but let's recap what exactly it is that DevOps teams do. The main DevOps principles concern the way the entire life cycle of software development is organized. Where software developers used to only write the code and then pass it over to the operations teams for deployment, DevOps introduced a significant cultural shift that included a whole different mindset.
When organizations adopt DevOps in their software engineering activities , there are often no separate, clearly defined development and operations teams. The engineering teams work on the product from development to deployment, and every team member is involved in every step of the process. Sometimes, typically in large companies with multiple teams, besides implementing DevOps methodology across the whole organization, there can also be a dedicated DevOps team that helps the engineering teams with integration of DevOps practices and tools into the team's software development process.
Since the DevOps approach is aimed at removing silos and making software production faster and more efficient, implementing DevOps means extensive use of automation, containerization, continuous integration and continuous delivery, and other DevOps tools and techniques that make it possible deploy new builds as often as multiple times a day, while keeping the apps reliable, scalable, highly available, and secure. Read more about the benefits of DevOps in our recent article.
Is DevOps not enough?
It looks like DevOps is a perfect solution, so why is there any need for something beyond it? Well, although DevOps does give your team a lot of benefits, it also means a significantly increased cognitive load. Not all organizations can afford to have a dedicated DevOps team or even a single DevOps professional. This means if they want to implement the DevOps approach, the engineers themselves have to take responsibility for DevOps tools and methods.
As a result, when a team adopts DevOps, every team member is involved in development and maintenance of the DevOps system, and developers have to quickly learn a lot of things besides actually coding. Learning how to use Kubernetes, for example, or how microservices architecture works can take a lot of time and effort.
If you underestimate exactly how complicated container orchestration and other techniques are, you might find your team struggling with the new skills they need just to keep the development going. Software engineering teams might start spending all their time on framework setup and infrastructure management, while the actual development lags behind.
This kind of self-service can be extremely detrimental to the well-being of software engineers and not sustainable for long. Negative developer experience will inevitably lead to a lower quality of software development and an eventual decrease in developer productivity.
Learn more about CodiLime's DevOps services.
What is platform engineering?
Platform engineering emerged as a way to help developers leverage their self-service capabilities in a way that would not be harmful to the entire development process. This is a comparatively new discipline but it is gaining followers quickly. Platform engineers, like DevOps professionals, also ensure that repetitive tasks that are extremely time-consuming if performed manually, like configuring repositories or provisioning infrastructure, get automated and properly documented. But the main idea behind platform engineering is to implement a set of standardized solutions, workflows, and tools within the organization, streamlining routine tasks and allowing software engineers to concentrate on building the software.
An integral part of platform engineering is to create an internal centralized platform that enables self-service. Such platforms for developers are created as internal products deployed and managed as on-prem, hybrid or cloud platforms and can be created as custom solutions that represent a combination of already existing infrastructure provisioning and configuration management tools used in custom workflows.
A platform engineer or a platform team may even use the very same tools as DevOps teams, like Kubernetes, Docker, and Terraform. But the platform engineering role is designing and building toolchains and workflows that are structured and reusable across multiple teams and don't require developers to actually become experts in using these new tools themselves.
Platform engineering teams provide support for the development team all the way from unit testing to production, giving the developers reliable tools that fulfill specific developer needs and facilitate the developers' freedom and self-service.
Platform engineering vs. DevOps
The main difference between DevOps and platform engineering is, perhaps, the attitude toward developers and their responsibilities. DevOps success is something that depends on every member of the engineering team actively working to promote DevOps efforts. Many organizations that adopt DevOps essentially put more work on each developer's plate. Besides going through development workflows and using their own tools in their everyday work, developers also have to learn and start using an extra set of DevOps tools to manage the complicated infrastructure and ensure application reliability.
Platform engineers provide an opportunity to use the popular DevOps techniques and tools across the organization without actually having developers themselves get into the details of how every tool or solution works. They treat developers like internal customers and the internal cloud platform as a product that should meet those customers' expectations.
An internal developer platform is something that can solve common problems and eliminate pain points for multiple teams while also being relatively easy to use. It is not just a help desk where developers are supposed to submit requests for provisioning infrastructure, for example. This shared platform allows developers to quickly complete routine tasks on their own, without waiting for someone to get back to them on their ticket.
Is platform engineering different from SRE?
Since some of the problems platform engineers solve usually have something to do with the infrastructure, there is often some confusion as to how platform engineering differs from site reliability engineering. There might indeed be some overlap between the work of a platform engineering team and SRE specialists. However, their purposes are different.
SRE specialists focus on applying software engineering principles to improve the availability and reliability of systems and infrastructure used by software engineering organizations. Platform teams' main goal is to enable software developers to build applications faster by implementing reusable standardized solutions, tools, and workflows across multiple teams. Automated infrastructure is a big part of platform engineering so platform teams can use the work of site reliability engineers as the foundation on which higher-level solutions are created.
You can learn more about the difference between SRE and DevOps in our previous article.
Choosing platform engineering vs. DevOps
You can see that platform engineering and DevOps have a lot in common, which means you don't really have to choose just one or the other. Very often you start by adopting the DevOps approach or creating a DevOps team in your organization. It might be exactly what you need to streamline software development and delivery up until the point where your organization starts to grow. Platform engineering is what you should look into when you have multiple teams using different DevOps workflows and tools.
If developer experience starts to suffer and productivity goes down because your engineers are spending more time on repetitive, time-consuming tasks like configuring the development environment, and that prevents them from building the actual software, it might be time to invest in an internal developer platform and a platform team.
Although automation is a big part of both platform engineering and DevOps, platform engineers take it to a different level. With platform engineering, tasks like infrastructure deployment can be automatically managed from a centralized platform, which reduces the cognitive load on developers and helps them to do their own jobs more efficiently
If the DevOps approach is something you already use across your organization, it doesn't necessarily mean you have to also immediately start working on an internal platform as well. It is crucial to first understand whether there are indeed some common problems negatively affecting the teams' performance that platform engineering can solve for you. Monitoring the processes and establishing key metrics will allow you to determine if a shared platform or internal developer portal can truly be beneficial for your teams.
Conclusion
Platform engineering might not be something that every single company needs to adopt right away. But if you are at a point where your engineers' work is suffering from the necessity to manage DevOps processes and tools on their own, together with a lack of standardized workflows, then platform engineering may be a solution that is worth the initial investment.
