From DevOps to Platform Engineering: Powering Business Success

The business goal of faster, more reliable application delivery has triggered developer teams to embrace new DevOps practices, which has led to the rise of platform engineering. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams as internal providers of reusable services, components, and tools for application delivery.

This transition marks a significant shift in how organizations approach software development and operations, aiming to optimize the entire delivery process through the creation of internal developer platforms.

It All Started With DevOps

When the philosophy of DevOps was introduced back in the early 2000s, it aimed to address the inefficiencies and bottlenecks in traditional software development processes often characterized by siloed teams and lengthy release cycles. The goal was to foster a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement, leveraging automation and agile methodologies to streamline the delivery pipeline.

While DevOps brought about significant improvements in software delivery as organizations adopted practices such as CI/CD, automated testing, and infrastructure as code, when organizations scaled DevOps, they often encountered new challenges. Development teams were struck with the complexity of managing increasingly diverse and distributed systems and faced friction in provisioning resources and deploying applications, often while waiting on operations teams to fulfill requests.

The Emergence of Platform Engineering

Implementing DevOps principles can be a challenge for software development teams, as it requires real culture change to foster smooth collaboration between development and operations teams. To bridge the gap, platform engineering emerged as a practical approach to deliver on the promise of DevOps by leveraging the concept of an internal developer platform (IDP). The IDP brings together the considerations of both development and operations teams in the form of a platform as a product to service the needs of both teams. These platforms provide self-service capabilities, standardized workflows, and integrated tooling, enabling developers to deliver applications more efficiently and consistently. Platform benefits extend to the operations teams that support these applications as they experience enhanced security, observability, and governance.

Platform engineering can be seen as the next evolution in the software delivery process. It shifts the focus from individual teams managing their own tools and processes to a centralized platform team providing a cohesive, integrated environment for development and operations.

This approach offers several key advantages, including:

How Platform Engineering Solves Scaling Complexity

As organizations strive to innovate and respond to market demands more rapidly, the need for a streamlined and efficient software delivery process becomes paramount. The complicated nature of managing multiple applications and services increases exponentially as organizations grow.

Platform engineering provides a solution with the tools and frameworks needed to scale software delivery processes, ensuring that organizations can handle increasing workloads without sacrificing quality or speed. It also leads to improved consistency and reliability. By standardizing workflows and automating processes, platform engineering reduces the variability and risk associated with manual interventions. This leads to more consistent and reliable deployments, enhancing the overall stability of applications in production.

Further productivity comes from the efficiency it offers developers themselves. Developers are most productive when they can focus on writing code and solving business problems. Platform engineering removes the friction associated with provisioning resources, managing environments, and handling operational tasks, allowing developers to concentrate on what they do best. It also provides the infrastructure and tools needed to experiment, iterate, and deploy new features rapidly, enabling organizations to stay ahead of the curve.

As the recent Snowflake data breach has shown, security and compliance are of the utmost importance for organizations of all sizes and within every industry. Establishing a comprehensive security posture to protect against ever-increasing security threats is a responsibility that spans both development and operations teams. Platform engineering allows for these considerations to be encoded into the core workflows of delivering applications and services through the platform. This drives security measures by ensuring that best practices are consistently applied across the organization. Automated policies and guardrails enforce security standards, reducing the risk of vulnerabilities and compliance issues.

Final Thoughts on Transitioning to Platform Engineering

The journey from DevOps to platform engineering represents a significant evolution in how organizations approach software development and operations. By building on the principles of DevOps, platform engineering offers a more structured, efficient, and scalable approach to software delivery.

In today’s fast-paced technology landscape, platform engineering is not just a nice-to-have but a critical enabler of business growth and innovation.