In 2009, the emergence of cloud computing and automation toolsledto the rise of DevOps, which aimed to eliminate the barriers between development and operations. It evolved from traditional system administration, which led to DevOps and then to platform engineering. Automating repetitive tasks—such as infrastructure provisioning, deployment, and monitoring—is central to platform engineering. The goal of platform engineering is to streamline the software development process by providing standardized tools, infrastructure, and workflows that support faster and more reliable software delivery. This IBM guide shows how to gain end-to-end visibility, accelerate root cause analysis and resolve issues before they impact users. Security teams help ensure that the platform complies with security standards and regulations, supported by integrated security practices within the platform that help mitigate risks.
Popular IaC tools such as Terraform, Ansible, and Pulumi help platform engineers automate and manage infrastructure efficiently, while CI/CD pipelines ensure that code changes and deployments happen seamlessly. While DevOps aims to bridge development and operations, and SRE focuses on reliability, platform engineering integrates these disciplines to create a cohesive environment that enhances the overall developer experience. At its core, platform engineering is about creating an internal developer platform (IDP) that standardizes and automates the processes involved in software development and delivery. Platform engineering addresses these challenges by building a unified, self-service platform that empowers developers to manage infrastructure and services independently.
Mature companies with legacy infrastructure are mobilizing in preparation for the great migration to the cloud, and cloud providers are ready to accept them with open arms. These factors include the increased popularity and extensibility of cloud providers, Kubernetes, and infrastructure as code. The rise of microservices, container orchestration, and the like have introduced novel https://innovatenexes.com/crafting-efficiency-with-mobile-devices.html engineering challenges. If you want platform engineering backed by real metrics, learn how Splunk can support your organization. They care about uptime, release stability, and how quickly issues are resolved.
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Why Platform Engineering Emerged
However, a platform engineering team may build tooling and infrastructure that increases engineering productivity. On one hand, building a platform engineering team detracts resources from building business logic and developing features. There are tradeoffs organizations often consider when considering building a platform engineering team. Below is a figure that illustrates how infrastructure as code and platform engineers fit into a development team, as well as how these tools, ultimately, lead to more features. An organization’s platform engineers tailor infrastructure as code tools to the needs of the organization’s application developers.
- By integrating security measures into the platform’s core, platform engineers can provide a secure environment without slowing down development processes.
- Platform engineering offers scalability through its standardization and consistency.
- Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite further extends Red Hat OpenShift with an internal developer portal and trusted software supply chain to deliver a comprehensive internal developer platform (IDP).
- Providing devs with a unified place to perform tasks such as running tests and bringing up new environments improves consistency while eliminating complexity and keeping your DevOps flow running smoothly.
A brief history of platform engineering
Without the automation, self-service, and abstraction provided by platform engineering, DevOps teams would struggle to achieve the speed and reliability that modern software delivery demands. Despite their differences, DevOps and platform engineering complement each other in many ways. While DevOps is more of a cultural movement, platform engineering is a technical discipline that focuses on building the infrastructure and tools that support DevOps practices. DevOps practices typically involve continuous integration, continuous delivery, and infrastructure as code, all aimed at reducing deployment times and increasing the reliability of software systems. While platform engineering and DevOps are closely related, there are key differences between the two that are important to understand.
Remote opportunities are exceptionally abundant, as platform engineering practices are inherently designed for distributed teams. Industry reports show that platform engineering roles have grown by over 80% in recent years, with median salaries ranging from $110,000 for entry-level positions to $200,000+ for senior platform architects. Unlike traditional DevOps engineers who focus on specific applications or services, Platform Engineers think in terms of reusable, scalable systems that serve multiple teams and projects. Together, platform engineering and DevOps enable organizations to achieve faster, more reliable software delivery. This allows developers to focus on writing code and delivering new features faster, ultimately reducing time to market and improving software quality. As platform engineering continues to evolve, we can expect to see even greater levels of abstraction in infrastructure management.
What is platform engineering?
DevOps worked hard to ensure every line of code that reaches production is bulletproof. Production & Staging only two types of environments today; we have dozens of them (QA, Security, Pre-Prod, Dev-Env, Single/Multi-Tenant) to shift-left everything away from production https://texas-news.com/animated-storytelling-for-brands-how-companies-use-2d-animation-to-tell-their-story-and-emphasize-their-corporate-image.html as much as possible. It’s for engineers, platform leads, and managers who want to align technical and business goals around platform engineering. Live weekly sessions (recorded if you can’t join), self-paced modules, guest lectures, and an active Slack community of 500+ platform engineers.
These lists illustrate the main differences between DevOps and platform engineering. It can be difficult to choose between platform engineering and a more traditional DevOps position because the roles share many similarities. Indeed reports over 24,000 platform engineering jobs currently available in the US. The role of platform engineers is increasingly sought after due to the technical expertise required and the ongoing skills shortage in the field. The salary range for a platform engineer in the United States falls between https://www.internetling.com/2019/12 $160,000 and $270,000, depending on experience, location, and specific employer factors. Shadowing other platform engineers in your organization can also be helpful for gaining first-hand experience in maintaining IDPs.
- Put simply, considering building a platform engineering team can be thought of as weighing short-term gains against long-term gains.
- Internal developer platforms allow developers to provision infrastructure, deploy applications, and manage resources without having to rely on operations teams.
- As organizations grow, platform engineering can be helpful.
- “internal developer portals serve as the interface through which developers can discover and access internal developer platform capabilities.”
- The Platform Hub enables platform engineers to focus on developer experience optimization, strategic capabilities, and innovation rather than tooling maintenance.
Platform engineering benefits
The first State of Platform Engineering Report attempts to answer these ongoing questions, give information on the current state of platform engineering, and compile some key resources from different corners of the community. Humanitec recently published the first State of Platform Engineering Report – here are the key things learnings from the report along with important trends in platform engineering. With a rapidly growing community and tooling landscape, platform engineering is clearly here to stay. They focus on creating scalable, reliable, and secure environments for applications, managing infrastructure as code, automating deployment pipelines, and ensuring the overall stability and performance of the platform. If you are ready to improve your organization’s performance with platform engineering, start by signing up for a free CircleCI account. Organizations can use platform teams to unlock and scale up the benefits of DevOps, augmenting developer agility with organizational reliability, visibility, and confidence.
What are the benefits of platform engineering?
In terms of salary, platform engineers earned the highest average pay among popular cloud-native job titles. This analysis will focus on the Kubernetes ecosystem, where platform engineers and software engineers often work together. Career evolution is typically marked by deeper expertise, broader impact, and leadership in either technical or organizational dimensions. Their career growth involves increasing scope, designing systems that support hundreds of developers, defining platform roadmaps, and contributing to engineering-wide standards.
Strong Communication Skills
To aid this collaboration, platform engineering offers DevOps teams a centralized platform for their tools and workflows. To better comprehend this role’s function, one must first understand how the discipline of platform engineering relates to DevOps as a whole. Ultimately, an effective IDP is specifically tailored to the developers using it, ensuring a frictionless delivery process and the utmost user satisfaction. Platform engineering offers scalability through its standardization and consistency. The self-service portals inherent to platform engineering greatly simplify operational processes. Other aspects of the discipline — such as infrastructure as code, automation, and standardization — reduce extraneous manual processes to increase developer productivity.