Software developers invest a significant portion of their time, up to 50%, in activities beyond design and development. These include waiting for builds, troubleshooting deployments, creating pipelines, and analyzing cloud costs. Allocating high-value human capital to low-leverage activities is wasteful. Enterprises focusing on high-leverage activities achieve a 55% higher innovation rate, resulting in approximately 5 times faster revenue growth.
Onboarding a new developer often takes days, involving setting up the development environment, access to repositories, build and test systems, and deployment pipelines. Streamlining this process is essential for a developer to start product development promptly. A new developer should ideally execute the entire flow, from a test commit to deploying it in a test environment, within a few hours on day 1(even better is deploying all the way to production).
In large enterprises, different software groups may develop independently, leading to various tools, inconsistent processes, and security risks. Platform Engineering addresses this by building and maintaining a common set of tools, infrastructure, and self-service systems supporting software engineering groups. This includes source code management, build and test systems, CI/CD tools, artifactories, security tools, documentation systems, and internal developer portals.
Platform Engineering collaborates with product engineering, DevOps, and SRE to understand evolving needs and automate routine developer requests. It develops the Internal Developer Portal, a self-help launchpad for creating new projects, repositories, and accessing resources.
Distinguishing between Platform Engineering, DevOps, and SRE is crucial. Platform Engineering installs and manages tools like GitLab, DevOps designs and implements pipelines, and SRE focus on making sure the application meets the defined SLOs and takes care of all of the non-functional requirements (all of the lities—observability, reliability, auto-scaling, security, performance, uptime, and availability) of the application, including incident management, triaging, and recovering from problems.
Benefits of Platform Engineering:
- Common and Consistent Tools: Ensures all departments and teams use a standardized tool chain, reducing costs, security loopholes, and developers’ wasted time.
- Security: Builds secure systems adaptable across the organization as software complexity and hacking risks increase.
- Rotation of Developers: Enhances developer productivity when moving between teams by maintaining a consistent tool chain.
Developers are busy developing software, while DevOps engineers are focused on building necessary automation that includes CICD pipelines, deployments, test integrations, etc. that helps to reduce lead time for changes, increase deployment frequency, and team velocity. SREs are intensely focused on protecting service level objectives, monitoring, and incident management. All three internal customers would benefit from the common platform and tools provided by Platform Engineering.
