Get to Know Platform Engineering

In development, seemingly minor changes can have a seismic impact.  

Take engineering platforms, which traditionally focus heavily on functionality and compliance and are often architected by leadership. While there’s nothing wrong with this approach, it frequently leaves opportunities for improved productivity and efficiency on the table. 

However, one simple shift in focus can help your organization achieve its development goals while dramatically improving the speed and quality of your products. It even has a name: platform engineering. 

What is platform engineering? 

While not the most exciting name, platform engineering creates a cohesive and scalable foundation for software development and deployment. 

The primary goal is to reduce complexity, improve consistency, and foster a collaborative environment. To do this, the design of engineering platforms is no longer the responsibility of leadership, but rather, it is focused on five key steps: 

1. Automating the provisioning and management of infrastructure using code to ensure consistency and repeatability. This is known as Infrastructure as Code (IaC). 
2. Implementing automated pipelines for building, testing, and deploying applications to reduce manual intervention and errors.
3. Designing applications via a microservices architecture so they can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently.
4. Baking monitoring, logging, and tracing mechanisms into the development process to gain insights into system performance and troubleshooting issues.
5. Ensuring the platform adheres to security best practices and regulatory requirements.
   

Again, these are not radical steps but a shift in mindset toward the developer experience, productivity, and predictability.

In other words, it means changing the tone of your developers’ conversations from “This is the platform you need to use” to “This is a platform that makes your job easier.” 

Benefits of platform engineering

When organizations embrace platform engineering, they unlock many benefits — not just for developers but also for their business. These benefits include:

• Improved productivity by reducing developers' time configuring environments, setting up infrastructure, and troubleshooting problems.
• Greater collaboration between development, operations, and security teams.
• Better scalability, flexibility, resource allocation, and the ability to experiment with new technologies and approaches without disrupting existing systems
• Consistency and reliability from standardized tools and processes across the organization help eliminate manual errors, provide a repeatable process for deploying applications, and reduce the risk of configuration drift.
  
• Enhanced security and compliance via automated security testing, continuous monitoring, and an overall proactive approach to safety.

Moving to platform engineering

Making the shift to platform engineering is challenging. Organizations that make the move often encounter potential roadblocks, the three most common of which are:

1. The initial investment of time, resources, and expertise required to build a developer-friendly platform 
2. A cultural shift is necessary within the organization since teams must adopt new tools, processes, and working methods. 
3. Platform engineering is not a one-time effort but an ongoing process of improving and evolving the platform to keep up with changes in technology and business needs.

None of these roadblocks are insurmountable, but it’s helpful to know about them before encountering them so you can plan accordingly.

Additionally, as platform engineering is increasingly adopted, cloud providers and other companies are developing products to facilitate adoption.

AWS Proton, for example, is designed to help users create standard, vetted templates that can be used as turnkey solutions for developers. The tool includes:

• Automated deployments
• User-managed environments 
• Flexible definitions  
• Support for versioning infrastructure templates 
• Tagging capabilities 
  

For an example of AWS Proton in action, check out this write-up we did with AWS on how to create an internal developer platform built with the tool. Here’s an excerpt:

Are you looking to streamline your organization's application development process? Schedule a clarity call with our experts today to learn more about platform engineering and other solutions.