What is platform engineering?

Key concepts in platform engineering

Platform engineering interconnects with DevOps principles and IDPs in the software development process. Here are the definitions of these core concepts.

DevOps is a set of practices and tools that merges development (Dev) and operations (Ops), emphasizing collaboration, automation, and continuous improvement. This approach advocates for continuous integration, continuous deployment (CI/CD), and infrastructure as code (IaC) to support efficient software delivery.

IDPs, like Compass, use this DevOps approach to provide developers with a unified interface to access tools, automate CI/CD pipelines, manage environments, and monitor performance. Platform engineering is responsible for designing, building, and maintaining IDPs.

Platform engineering is also vital in lifting an organization’s complexity limit. The complexity limit is the amount of complexity teams are able to navigate before it impacts job satisfaction, software quality, and software development efficiencies.

Core responsibilities of platform engineers

Platform engineering teams are responsible for creating the internal tools and environments that developers use for development and deployment. They must ensure the platform aligns with an organization’s specific requirements while improving developer experience. Platform engineers focus on automation, security, and scalability to make the platform user-friendly, secure, and efficient.

Platform engineering teams also try to reduce the cognitive load of software teams by abstracting organization complexity from their day-to-day work. When implemented correctly, platform engineering gives teams more time to spend on software development.

Here are some of the core responsibilities of platform engineers:

• Designing and implementing infrastructure: Platform engineers design and implement scalable, reliable, and automated infrastructure using IaC tools. Design and implementation ensure consistent and repeatable infrastructure management, reduce manual errors, and speed up deployment processes.
• Building CI/CD pipelines: Engineers build and maintain CI/CD pipelines to automate software delivery. This process involves applying code changes, running automated tests, and seamlessly deploying updates, ensuring rapid and reliable software releases.
• Maintaining and scaling platforms: Platform engineers maintain and scale platforms to meet the organization’s growing demands. This process includes managing containerized applications using orchestration tools, which ensure high availability and optimized performance. Platform engineers add custom tools and new services or modify existing workflows to adapt the platform to evolving requirements.
• Implementing security measures: Engineers implement robust security measures and standards to protect infrastructure and applications. This implementation involves automating security scans, enforcing compliance policies, and managing access controls. This safeguards against vulnerabilities and ensures regulatory adherence.
• Collaboration and support: Platform engineers collaborate with development and operations teams to provide support and ensure smooth platform operations. They work closely with these teams to understand their needs, troubleshoot issues, and continuously improve the platform to enhance developer productivity and operational efficiency. They may use workflow management tools to facilitate this collaboration.

The platform engineering workflow

The platform engineering workflow ensures a structured approach to building and maintaining robust, scalable, and secure platforms:

1. Requirement gathering: Platform engineers collaborate with stakeholders to understand the development and operations teams’ needs and requirements. This stage involves identifying the tools, technologies, and processes necessary to support the company’s goals. It often involves creating a flowchart to visualize the platform’s components and interactions.
2. Design and architecture: Engineers design the infrastructure and architecture based on the gathered requirements. This process includes selecting appropriate technologies, defining system components, and creating detailed architectural diagrams to ensure scalability, reliability, and security.
3. Implementation and development: Platform engineers implement infrastructure and platform components using IaC and other automation tools. Engineers develop CI/CD pipelines, configure container orchestration, and integrate necessary services to build a cohesive platform.
4. Testing and validation: Comprehensive testing validates the platform's functionality, performance, and security for every change in development before it goes into production. This step includes automated tests, load testing, and security assessments to ensure the platform meets all requirements and standards.
5. Deployment and maintenance: Engineers deploy the platform to production environments. Ongoing maintenance ensures its stability and performance. This step includes monitoring, scaling, and applying updates or patches as needed.
6. Feedback and iteration: Continuous feedback from users and stakeholders identifies areas for improvement. Engineers iterate on the platform, making necessary adjustments and enhancements to better meet the company’s evolving needs. They may use Agile methodologies such as Scrum or Kanban to manage these iterations.

Benefits of platform engineering

Platform engineering offers various benefits that can significantly enhance an organization’s software development and delivery processes. Here are some key advantages.

Increased developer productivity

Platform engineering aims to streamline and automate various tasks and processes, which allows developers to focus more on writing code and delivering features. With self-service platforms, automated workflows, and reusable components, developers can spend less time on repetitive, manual tasks and more time on value-adding activities.

Faster time to market for applications

With platform engineering, companies can accelerate the software delivery life cycle through automation, standardization, and streamlined processes. CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and IaC practices enable faster and more frequent releases, reducing the time to market for new applications and features.

Improved application scalability and reliability

Platform engineering promotes the adoption of cloud-native technologies such as containerization and orchestration tools. These technologies enable highly scalable, resilient, and fault-tolerant applications, ensuring consistent performance even during heavy loads or system failures.

Reduced operational costs

Platform engineering helps companies optimize resource utilization and reduce operational costs by automating infrastructure provisioning, configuration management, and deployment processes. Standardized platforms and reusable components also minimize duplication of effort and technical debt, contributing to cost savings.

Enhanced developer experience

Platform engineering aims to create a smooth and efficient development experience by providing developers with self-service access to tools, resources, and environments. Workflow management solutions and project planning tools support this experience. Developers can work more autonomously, reducing friction and bottlenecks, and enjoy a culture of innovation and collaboration. An improved developer experience leads to higher job satisfaction, which helps to attract and retain key talent.

Challenges of platform engineering

Platform engineering involves navigating several complex challenges to maintain efficient and reliable systems.

Balancing innovation with stability

Platform engineers must innovate to improve systems while ensuring stability and reliability. Rapid changes can introduce risks. Finding the right balance between adopting new technologies and maintaining a stable environment is crucial and can be achieved through careful project planning and a project roadmap.

Managing technical debt

Technical debt accumulates when a company implements quick fixes or suboptimal solutions to meet immediate needs. Platform engineers must address this debt to prevent it from hindering future development and maintain long-term system health.

Keeping up with evolving technologies

The technology landscape evolves constantly. Platform engineers must stay current with the latest tools, frameworks, and best practices. This requires continuous learning and adaptation to integrate new technologies effectively.

Ensuring platform security

Engineers must implement robust security measures to protect against vulnerabilities and ensure compliance with regulatory standards. This involves ongoing monitoring and updating of security protocols.

Tools and technologies used in platform engineering

When deciding on the development methodology, platform engineers often compare Kanban vs. Scrum to determine which approach best suits their team's needs and goals. 

Specific tool choices depend on the company’s technology stack, cloud providers, and requirements. However, essential tools and technologies used in platform engineering include the following:

• IDPs are internal products consisting of tools, services, and processes that enable software teams to deliver software autonomously and faster
• Cloud platforms provide the underlying infrastructure and services that platform engineering builds upon. Cloud-based IDP options like Compass offer simplified onboarding and extensibility without the cost and overhead of maintaining your own platform.
• CI/CD tools enable automated application building, testing, and deployment. They are crucial to implementing reliable and repeatable software delivery pipelines and key integrations within an IDP. CI/CD pipelines ensure code changes are seamlessly integrated and deployed. Multi-cloud continuous delivery platforms can release software changes with high velocity and confidence by automating deployment pipelines to control when releases go into production. They prevent the next rollout if the previous one fails and make rollbacks easier.
• Incident management capabilities allow teams to respond to and resolve issues quickly. Connecting IDPs to tools like Jira Service Management provides automated alerts, root cause analysis, and incident tracking so teams can see what’s impacting their service health and reliability in one location.
• IaC tools enable the definition and management of cloud infrastructure through code, allowing for consistent, repeatable infrastructure provisioning.
• Container technologies package applications into portable, isolated containers. Container orchestration platforms automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.
• Observability and monitoring tools provide capabilities for collecting metrics, logs, and traces to gain visibility into application and infrastructure health and performance. IDPs integrate observability tools, including application performance monitoring, logging, error tracking, and tracing, that offer real-time insights into application performance and resource usage. Teams can monitor their applications from the platform, making identifying and resolving issues quicker and easier.
• Security and compliance tools assist with security scanning, secrets management, policy enforcement, and compliance. Connected security tools, such as automated vulnerability scanning, combined with default compliance controls and security scorecards, ensure that applications meet organizational security standards, reducing developers' need for manual security management.
• Service mesh tools provide a dedicated infrastructure layer for managing service-to-service communication in microservices architectures. They enable features such as traffic management, security, and observability.

Improve platform engineering with Compass

Platform engineering is a complex but vital discipline within software development. It requires a delicate balance of innovation and stability. Properly implemented, platform engineering empowers developers with self-service capabilities, accelerates software delivery, and improves application reliability. 

Atlassian’s IDP, Compass, has already helped thousands of organizations enable their platform teams to improve developer experience and software development at scale.