DevOps -> Platform Engineering
What it means and challenges it brings
Anyone who follows the DevOps world, knows that we have moved to Platform engineering. In this post, we will see what this means, why this could’ve happened and its implications.
I thought we were doing DevOps, what is this Platform engineering thing now?
The core idea of DevOps was that the development and the operations team collaborate to make software and value delivery smoother. Now in reality, collaboration is hard. It has tons of variables - what timezone are your teams working in? What tools are they using? Are they fully remote? Do they like each other? Do they have a common ground w.r.t. skills and knowledge? Many, many variables.
So if DevOps requires “collaboration” at its core, you are going to have a hard time successfully implementing it if any variable goes wrong.
I mean, yes - I’ve learned tens of tools and domain specific YAML configurations to automate processes. The product engineers have no clue about these tools, so it does get hard to collaborate at an engineering level. A lot of trust is required.
Totally, besides why would they want to learn these? They want to build features for the users. Why would they learn new tools that have nothing to do with that?
With DevOps we went from Operators collaborating with Developers to Developers collaborating with Developers. And when that happens, what do you think becomes the best way to collaborate?
Ermmm… APIs?
OK you stole my thunder, but that’s right. APIs are a better mode for Developers to collaborate. And now you understand “Platform Engineering”. Operators, who are also now developers, build APIs that other developers or operators can consume - to collaborate better - and reduce dependencies. Your systems will have APIs integrated everywhere - CICD, monitoring, etc., besides your operators (yes, you will need them still) will use them, maybe even your customer facing teams.
What’s the catch? Self-Service sounds too good to be true.
There is always a catch. In this case, you will need to solve for Governance - access control, costs, business alignment, quality, etc. It is challenging to get this right and failure to do so can be catastrophic.
Suddenly it got scary.
It doesn’t have to be - we will look at how we can get there.