Platform Engineering involves the design, development, and maintenance of internal development platforms that help application developers and operations teams work efficiently throughout the application development lifecycle.

Businesses today are constantly under pressure to develop and ship applications faster to be competitive in the market. Modern application development systems have become ever more complex to shoulder this responsibility.

Development and operations teams employ cutting-edge and ever-evolving technologies and tools to deliver high-value software and enhancements in an incredibly short amount of time.

They’ve adopted new practices such as DevOps, automation, and, recently, AI in operations to meet the challenges of fast-paced application development. This has led the developers and ops teams to take on new cross-functional roles where they are constantly involved in setting up and maintaining development and delivery pipelines alongside their core responsibilities, which are development and operations.

But have these new practices solved the problems of the software teams and business’ entirely? Maybe not entirely. Let me explain this in the following section.

Why platform engineering?

So here’s the big question. Are these new application development systems and methods efficient enough? Do they address all the problems of software delivery and deployment 100%?

Here’s the crux of the matter.

Developers and operation staff should be doing what they’re adept at—writing development code and managing operations. But they are now burdened with the responsibilities of setting up and maintaining tool chains, pipelines, and related documentation for them. This nature of multitasking has led the teams to underperform and become less efficient than we expected. This manner of software development leads to poor DevEx, or developer experience, as we call it.

So we haven’t really made the entire system efficient. The tools, techniques, and systems have evolved beautifully, but the efficiency of human resources has been totally compromised.

Platform Engineering addresses this very problem we have with modern-day application development and delivery.

What is platform engineering and what do platform engineers do?

Platform engineering is the process in which a separate team of experts called Platform Engineers builds and maintains Internal Development Platforms to aid developers and operations in their day-to-day work.

The main purpose behind engaging a completely separate Platform Team to take care of development platforms is to allow developers and operations personnel to focus on their core responsibilities and become more productive. This greatly enhances the developer experience, which translates to better code, faster development cycles, and quicker deployments.

Platform engineering ensures that core dev and ops teams are completely free of the responsibilities of platform-related tasks, reducing their cognitive load and resulting in developer efficiency and happiness. Note the emphasis on developer experience and happiness here. This is the other half of the modern application development process, besides the dev and ops pipelines that were previously sidelined.

Platform engineers burden the entire responsibility of infrastructure provisioning and configuration management with deployment automation and monitoring. Their role is mission-critical and can hinder efficiency if not done effectively.

Let’s move further to understand the responsibilities of a Platform Engineer.

Role and responsibilities of a Platform Engineer

1. Design and Implement Infrastructure

One of the primary roles of a Platform Engineer is to design and implement infrastructure based on the requirements of an individual business or project. The engineer aims at building a solution customized to fit the exact needs of the application.

Engineers work closely with stakeholders to understand the application’s requirements, including aspects such as performance, security, and scalability.

They are tasked with the work of evaluating different cloud providers, such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure, among many others, or may be required to host the application in hybrid or on-premise environments. The engineers are well versed in IaC principles and manage and provision infrastructure through Infrastructure as Code, or IaC, and automation. They also have a thorough understanding of network architecture.

2. Setup and configure Containerization and Orchestration.

A key function of a Platform Engineer is to install containerization technologies such as Docker on nodes or servers to package applications and dependencies into containers. They implement security best practices for Docker, ensuring they run in isolated environments and are configured with appropriate permissions. They also integrate it into the Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines and set up the automation for building Docker images and pushing them to container registries.

Platform engineers are responsible for setting up and configuring container orchestration systems for automating software deployment, management, and scaling, like Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, or Apache Mesos, among others. Let’s take Kubernetes, for instance.

The engineers are involved in setting up and configuring Kubernetes clusters. This includes configuring master and worker nodes, establishing network policies, and ensuring cluster-level security. They manage the configuration of Kubernetes resources, such as deployments, services, and persistent volumes, to ensure that applications run as intended.

A Platform Engineer will also configure Kubernetes to automatically scale applications based on demand and set up load balancing to distribute traffic evenly across applications.

They’ll implement monitoring and logging solutions, configure security measures, and, if required, integrate Kubernetes with other tools and platforms to create a seamless environment for development, testing, and production.

3. Implement solutions for Monitoring and Observability and Incident Response.

Engineers implement monitoring solutions like Prometheus, Grafana, and others to track infrastructure and application performance. They set up alerts for proactive issue identification and resolution.

An engineer also develops incident response plans and procedures. They utilize tools for log analysis and real-time monitoring to promptly address and resolve incidents.

4. Security Management, Backup and Disaster Recovery, and Patch Management:

A platform engineer is also responsible for the implementation of security best practices across the infrastructure. They configure firewalls, security groups, and access controls, and regularly update and patch systems to address vulnerabilities.

They design and implement backup strategies for critical data and develop and test disaster recovery plans to ensure business continuity in case of failure. Engineers develop and implement patch management processes to keep systems up-to-date with the latest security patches while scheduling regular maintenance windows for updates.

5. Automation Scripting and Log Management:

The Platform team writes automation scripts in Bash, Python, and such to automate repetitive operational tasks related to maintenance, monitoring, and deployment. They also set up centralized log management systems such as ELK Stack, Splunk, etc. to aggregate and analyze logs from various components for troubleshooting and performance analysis.

6. Capacity Planning:

Engineers analyze performance metrics to determine resource utilization and plan for capacity expansion based on current and projected workloads.

7. Infrastructure Scaling:

The team implements strategies to dynamically scale the infrastructure to meet changing workloads and demands in both vertical and horizontal dimensions. This is done by implementing auto-scaling mechanisms. They optimize configurations and ensure bottlenecks are eliminated for successful scaling of infrastructure.

8. Documentation:

Platform Engineers produce and update documentation required for the management and maintenance of IT infrastructure and applications. For instance, they create a detailed document that outlines the architecture and configuration of the infrastructure and create a configuration document with details of various components, including servers, databases, and network devices. The document they produce serves as a reference for troubleshooting or rollback procedures.

The Platform Teams also produce documentation to help the development and ops teams with strategies, procedures, and training material to perform their tasks effectively. These include deployment procedures, disaster recovery plans, incident response plans, CI/CD pipeline documentation, documentation for monitoring and alerting procedures, scaling strategies, change management documentation, and best practices and guidelines.

Thorough documentation produced by platform engineers ensures team members have every piece of information they need to perform their roles effectively and respond to challenges with agility and confidence.

Key business benefits of Platform Engineering?

While Platform Engineering offers numerous advantages to the developers and operations teams by enhancing their experience and effectiveness, it is proven to be rewarding to the organization.

Let see how businesses benefit by implementing Platform Engineering in their application development work flow.

1. Accelerated Time-to-Market:

Organizations and customers benefit from the rapid deployment of applications and feature updates. Platform engineers enable processes that enable faster development, testing, and deployment, thus reducing time-to-market for new products and feature releases.

2. Increased Efficiency and Productivity:

Streamlined and automated workflows in infrastructure management and application deployment reduce manual effort, minimize errors, and enhance the overall efficiency and productivity of teams.

3. DevOps Culture and Collaboration:

Platform Engineers promote the DevOps culture, fostering collaboration and communication and better synergy between teams. This alignment leads to smoother workflows and faster issue resolution.

4. Reduced Downtime and Improved Disaster Recovery:

Platforms are designed with disaster recovery mechanisms and efficient monitoring systems that help reduce downtime and speed recovery from unexpected events. It results in increased customer satisfaction and lower customer support costs.

5. Cost Optimization:

Platform teams optimize resource allocation, utilize cloud services well, and automate cost-saving measures, resulting in reduced operational costs.

6. Centralized Management and Visibility:

Platform Engineering tools often provide centralized management dashboards and monitoring capabilities that offer businesses a comprehensive view of their IT landscape and investments.

7. Adaptability to Emerging Technologies:

Platform Engineers stay informed about the latest innovations in technologies such as edge computing, AI, and machine learning and relevant tools and incorporate them into the application development workflow.

8. Innovation Enablement:

Platform Teams facilitate continuous innovation. By automating repetitive tasks and providing a scalable and reliable infrastructure, Platform Engineering frees up time and resources for innovative endeavors as development teams can focus on creating new features and functionalities.

9. Security and Compliance:

Platform Engineers integrate security best practices throughout the development and deployment lifecycle. This ensures that applications and infrastructure are secure and meet regulatory compliance requirements.

Conclusion:

While DevOps introduced revolutionary practices in modern application development, it inadvertently burdened development and operations teams with unwanted responsibilities, hindering their true potential. Platform Engineering emerges as the remedy, addressing the critical need to free teams from the complexities of platform-related tasks.

Organizations can unlock a new realm of possibilities by assigning a dedicated team of experts — Platform Engineers — to build and maintain internal development platforms.

Platform Engineering is not just a next step; it is the imperative evolution that businesses need to thrive in today’s competitive world of modern application development. Platform Engineering stands as the cornerstone for building resilient, efficient, and innovative digital ecosystems.