Platform engineering and DevOps are two prevalent philosophies in the technology industry today that aim to improve the efficiency of software development and delivery.
Both platform engineering and DevOps are critical functions for companies building software and digital products. Platform engineering provides the foundation that enables developer productivity and velocity.
DevOps facilitates the cross-functional collaboration and automation that allows companies to achieve continuous software delivery at scale. For high-performing technology organizations, platform engineering and DevOps work hand in hand to create an environment for building and delivering software rapidly, reliably, and securely.
In this article, we’ll look at how platform engineering and DevOps work, the differences between them and their importance to an efficient software development ecosystem.
What is Platform Engineering?
Platform engineering refers to the design and development of foundational technologies, frameworks, and tools that can then be used to efficiently create higher-level applications and solutions. It involves the creation of reusable and extensible foundational technologies to enable increased productivity, standardization, and economies of scale for your organization. Some key aspects of platform engineering include:
- Reusability: Platforms are designed to be reusable across multiple applications and use cases. The components are generic and configurable enough to be “stood upon” by different solutions.
- Extensibility: Platforms provide well-defined extension points and APIs so that they can be easily extended and customized for specific needs.
- Modularity: Platforms are comprised of decoupled modules that can be independently developed, updated, and replaced with minimal impact on other modules.
- Abstraction: Platforms abstract away lower-level implementation details and provide higher-level constructs and interfaces to build applications.
- Performance and scalability: Platforms are designed and optimized to meet performance and scalability requirements for a range of applications.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a software development methodology that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). The main goal of DevOps is to shorten the software development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality.
Some of the key concepts of DevOps include:
- Continuous Integration: Automatically merging code changes into a main branch several times a day. This allows developers to integrate code more frequently and identify issues early.
- Continuous Delivery: Release new code to production several times a day or week.
- Automation: Automating as many repetitive tasks as possible through tools, scripts, and infrastructure as code.
- Monitoring: Comprehensive application monitoring to quickly identify issues and improve performance.
- Collaboration: Breaking down silos between dev and ops teams to share knowledge and work together.
By embracing a DevOps culture and implementing DevOps practices, you can improve software release cycles, maximize the productivity of development and operations teams, and deliver higher customer value through rapid, stable software updates.
Importance of Platform Engineering and DevOps to the Software Development Life Cycle
Platform engineering:
- Improves developer productivity by providing standardized tools, frameworks, and infrastructure that abstract away complexity.
- Enables developer velocity by automating repetitive tasks and minimizing setup time for new projects.
- Increases application reliability and uptime by building a robust platform with monitoring, failover, and disaster recovery tools.
- Reduces costs through infrastructure automation and optimization.
DevOps:
- Facilitates continuous integration and delivery by breaking down silos between development and operations. This results in faster release cycles and time-to-market for new features.
- Improves software quality through a shared responsibility for quality between dev and ops. Issues can be detected and addressed earlier in the development process.
- Enables faster bug fixing and recovery times. Seamless collaboration between dev and ops teams results in faster responses to incidents and outages.
- Maximizes resource utilization. Reduced cycle times, manual work, and unplanned outages free teams to focus their efforts on critical priorities and value-add activities.
- Speeding up deployments. Deploying containerized applications is faster compared to traditional methods. Developers can deploy Docker (or any other containerization tool) for speedy release of updates to the software.
Improving the SDLC With Platform Engineering and DevOps
Platforms and DevOps work together to enable faster software releases. Platforms create reusable foundations for applications while DevOps integrates development and operations. Platforms rely on DevOps practices to evolve quickly. DevOps teams need platforms to efficiently build solutions. Strong collaboration between the teams is key for success. Together, they help businesses innovate faster and provide higher customer value.
