As the popularity of cloud-native applications rises steadily, software development becomes a more and more complex process. With multiple smaller autonomous teams working on separate components of your application, where each team often has a different tech stack, an isolated codebase, and even separate release procedures, it is not surprising that the amount of overhead snowballs too.
Modern DevOps best practices like containerization, automated continuous deployment, infrastructure as code, and others allow developers to shorten the release cycle and develop cloud-native applications in any type of cloud environment, using complex architectures, especially those based on microservices. In addition, many software engineering organizations are investing in site reliability engineering practices to ensure the high performance quality of their apps and services. But while all of that makes your apps more reliable and flexible, it also requires advanced technical skills from your development teams and a significant shift in the work culture across your organization.
For some development teams, the skills gap prevents them from adopting standardized DevOps and SRE practices systematically, while in other cases, with multiple teams working in the same organization, the problem might be that they have standardized tools but each team uses them in different ways, which inevitably ends in time being wasted creating custom processes and pipelines. Platform engineering has emerged as a solution that is the next step in cloud-native software delivery. Platform engineers focus on building workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering teams and integrating the necessary standardized tools for entire organizations. It's a comparatively new discipline, and in this article you will find the most important things you need to know about platform engineering.
What is platform engineering?
While DevOps practices have been around for quite some time, platform engineering is a new concept. The very first conference dedicated to platform engineering was organized as recently as 2022. The general principle of platform engineering is making modern software delivery processes less complex, thus reducing the cognitive load or amount of mental effort for developers and enhancing developer productivity.
In practice, platform engineering teams aim to solve problems related to repetitive tasks that can become a drain on time and resources if performed manually, like managing cloud infrastructure, or creating new and configuring existing code repositories, etc. In the modern app’s development life cycle platform, the engineer's role is to enhance the developer experience by designing and building toolchains that will allow software engineers to focus on actual development instead of spending precious time on tasks that can be easily automated.
Platform teams continuously review the entire life cycle of an application and use this knowledge to design and implement standardized key processes that can accelerate product teams' delivery and support developers all the way to production. There are several crucial elements in platform engineering but the most prominent is, perhaps, building internal developer platforms.
Internal developer platforms
Platform engineering aims at making developers more productive. One of the most critical aspects of that is enabling developer self-service and automation for daily routine tasks like infrastructure provisioning. Developers want to write code, not waste their time requesting infrastructure setup and then waiting for that ticket to be resolved. They want a solution that will allow them to do that themselves but won’t require lots of additional skills and knowledge they might not have the time to acquire.
An internal developer platform is a solution that combines all the tools, tech, services, and workflows that are required for a complete application or application’s component delivery in a particular organization. It can be a fully customized product developed specifically for internal customers but you don't always have to build such a platform from scratch. The main idea behind implementing an internal platform is to improve the internal developer experience by paving the so-called golden paths, that is, multiple levels of abstraction that ensure frictionless routine task completion and are based on the specific needs of your software developers.
Your own business needs will determine the exact requirements for your internal developer platform and the approach you choose. Depending on that, you can either use a ready-made platform, build a new platform from existing components, or develop one from scratch.
Designing and building an internal developer platform is how platform engineers not only enable developer self-service but also decrease the cognitive load on developers. By having a standardized workflow available developers don't need to actually keep in mind all the intricate details that a cloud-native setup typically involves, such as a deeper understanding of Kubernetes, Terraform, Argo CD or Helm.
Most often, internal developer platforms are implemented together with a web-based portal. An internal developer portal provides a user interface that allows developers to access the tools and solutions that comprise the internal developer platform. Some sort of catalog of services is usually a part of an internal developer portal.
A developer portal by itself isn’t going to solve any workflow and infrastructure issues. However, when combined with an internal platform, it helps to improve the developer experience by providing convenient access to internal platform capabilities.
Platform engineering principles
Many organizations have already discovered the benefits of having internal developer platforms and standardized workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software developers. Any large software engineering organization is at least curious about the possibility of adopting platform engineering at this point. If you want to have successful platform teams in your organization though, there are certain best practices that can help you achieve your goals.
Define the mission
If you have decided your software engineering organization can benefit from internal platform teams, it is crucial to understand the purpose and mission that a platform team is going to have. It is often helpful to draw up a mission statement to make sure the purpose of your platform engineers will align with your business goals in general.
Target common problems
One of the most important benefits of having an internal developer platform and platform engineering team is to solve the shared problems that software engineers in multiple teams have to solve over and over again. There are multiple ways to determine the main pain points, including developer feedback, engineering KPIs analysis, and so on. You need to understand the developer experience in detail before you can start improving it.
Find the balance
Although platform engineering aims at supporting developers in their everyday tasks, it is easy to overcorrect and take away a degree of developer autonomy instead. Finding the right balance might be a complicated task but if you define platform team standards proactively it will be possible to design solutions that can help everyone and not just specific engineers or operations teams' members.
Choose the right specialists
There are different kinds of professionals you will want to include in your platform engineering team, like DevOps engineers or SRE specialists. But you need to remember that a platform engineering team is essentially another product team, just working for internal customers, so make sure there are product managers, designers, front-end developers, etc. on your platform engineering team as well.
Use ready-made solutions
A platform-as-a-product approach means that the internal developer platform is created internally for internal customers. However, IDP development follows the processes used when creating solutions for external clients. That means at least some of the needs of the many development teams in your organization can be covered by acquiring ready-made products for CI/CD, IaS, etc. that can be customized to ensure maximum internal customer value from your developer portal and platform. Using a combination of third-party tools allows you to save the resources you will need if it turns out there is some missing functionality after all and you need to add a custom feature.
Platform engineering, DevOps, and SRE: what is the difference?
There is often confusion as to how exactly platform engineering differs from DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) as all of these disciplines essentially focus on making it easier for software product teams to do their jobs. DevOps is an older concept that deals with improving the collaboration between the development and operations teams by introducing certain principles that change the whole attitude towards the development process for every team member.
Platform engineering is largely viewed as a further extension and evolution of DevOps. It aims at reducing the interaction that DevOps teams still require with the engineers and allowing developers to work in a self-service manner.
Site reliability engineers utilize software tools to automate crucial IT infrastructure responsibilities, including system management and application monitoring. SRE is adopted by organizations to ensure the reliability of their software applications, even when frequently updated. Notably, SRE significantly enhances the reliability of scalable software systems by providing a more sustainable approach compared to manual management of numerous machines. By leveraging automation, SRE plays a pivotal role in maintaining optimal performance and availability, ensuring a seamless user experience, and minimizing potential downtimes.
If you want to get more details about the differences between DevOps and SRE, check out our previous publication.
Does every company need a platform engineering team?
Although we live in a cloud-native era, not all companies that deliver software build cloud-native or distributed applications. Moreover, some engineering organizations have small teams of developers that successfully manage a monolithic app without any need for additional workflows. So we can say that not every single organization will necessarily benefit from platform engineering.
However, you don’t necessarily need to have a very large team or several teams of developers to start thinking of getting your own platform team. Platform engineering starts being useful as soon as your number of developers reaches 20 or more, but certain other conditions have to be applicable too.
For instance, you may start to notice that your developers struggle with infrastructure setup and manual repetitive tasks, or releases happen less often because your developers’ cognitive load is too high, or there are specific pain points or bottlenecks that could be resolved by automation and standardization of workflows and introducing reusable solutions across the organization. That is definitely when building a platform team and implementing an internal developer platform can help you increase deployment frequency, free up your developers’ time and resources for doing actual product development, and improve the developer experience in general.
It is crucial not to postpone getting a platform team together for too long. You need to carefully watch your processes not to miss the point where your team starts to need more than that offered by a regular DevOps approach. Better to invest in platform engineers earlier but be ready to scale at any moment than to wake up one day and realize you need to hastily put together any sort of solution just to allow your large team to make another release happen.
Conclusion
Platform engineering might still be considered only an emerging discipline but, for large cloud-native teams, the value platform engineers provide is already quite indispensable. A platform engineering team connects all the engineers across your organization by offering standardized and automated tools, solutions, and workflows. An internal developer platform can not only radically increase your engineers' productivity but also make the onboarding of new team members painless and efficient.
The platform engineering community is growing rapidly and there are a number of places, like this Slack workspace 
, where active communication and collaboration happen. If you want to learn more before setting up your own platform team, it won't require any extraordinary effort.
If your engineering organization is all about cloud-native apps development and you hire more and more developers all the time, it might be time to think of platform engineering. Have your developers leverage the tools and solutions that comprise an internal developer platform and your customer will feel the difference too. Platform engineering teams can help your organization accelerate development and delivery, and overcome common obstacles by providing your developers with self-service capabilities for efficient and successful work.
