A Comprehensive Guide to Platform Engineering

If you want to build robust, scalable, and efficient applications, understanding the discipline of platform engineering is essential.

This article will delve into answering the following questions:

• What is platform engineering?
• Why is it increasingly important?
• How does it relate to DevOps?

Without wasting any time, let's dive straight in.

What Is Platform Engineering?

Platform engineering is the discipline of creating reliable, efficient, and scalable platforms that underpin various applications and services.

These platforms comprise the underlying infrastructure, tools, and services that developers utilize to create, deploy, and operate software.

The tasks behind platform engineering can range from designing APIs and managing databases to configuring servers and dealing with scalability issues.

It's an all-encompassing discipline that demands immense attention to detail.

Platform Engineering Vs DevOps: What's The Difference?

While both platform engineering and DevOps strive for increased efficiency and productivity in software development, serve different roles and focal points.

Platform engineering is all about building and maintaining the platforms and infrastructure that enable applications to run.

This typically requires intricate system-level design and development.

DevOps signifies a cultural shift that promotes collaboration between development and operations teams.

This approach aims to shorten the system development life cycle and continuously deliver high-quality software.

As platform engineering gives DevOps teams a central platform to power their workflows, it should help reduce cognitive load.

Is DevOps Part Of Platform Engineering?

Even though DevOps and platform engineering are two distinct practices, they often complement each other. 

You can integrate DevOps principles into platform engineering to enhance platform development and maintenance efficiency and quality.

Automated testing and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, which are central to DevOps, can be used to ensure platform reliability and performance.

As a result, DevOps is an integral part of a comprehensive platform engineering strategy.

How Does Platform Engineering Work?

Platform engineering involves developing platforms that provide a foundation for software applications.

The process begins with having a thorough understanding of the system requirements.

This is followed by designing and developing the platform.

You will need to set up the necessary infrastructure - which may include building APIs, configuring databases and servers, and monitoring and troubleshooting the platform to ensure smooth operation.

Is Platform Engineering The Future?

As technology keeps improving, platform engineering is of increasing importance.

We are dealing with more complex systems and higher demands for scalability, so we need strong, efficient platforms.

Platform engineering fits well with current development practices like microservices and serverless architectures.

With this in mind, it's clear that platform engineering will play a big role in the future of software development.

Why Do You Need Platform Engineering?

Without a solid platform, software applications run the risk of suffering from performance issues, security vulnerabilities, and scalability constraints.

Platform engineering helps prevent these problems by ensuring that the underlying infrastructure is equipped to meet the challenges of your software applications.

When you have a well-designed platform, this has the potential to significantly boost developer productivity.

It should provide a set of common services and tools that developers can leverage to focus on creating unique application features.