The Rise of Platform Engineering

Empowering Teams for Efficient Software Delivery

In the rapidly evolving world of software development, organizations are constantly seeking ways to streamline their processes, enhance collaboration, and deliver value to customers faster. Enter platform engineering—a paradigm shift that is transforming the way teams build and deploy software. In this article, we'll explore the concept of platform engineering, its benefits, and how it relates to the principles outlined in the influential book "Team Topologies" and the ING microteams model.

Understanding Platform Engineering

Platform engineering is an approach that focuses on creating a self-service platform that empowers development teams to build, deploy, and operate their applications independently. It involves designing and maintaining a set of tools, frameworks, and infrastructure components that abstract away the complexities of the underlying infrastructure, allowing teams to focus on delivering business value.

At its core, platform engineering aims to provide a consistent and standardized environment for application development and deployment. By encapsulating best practices, security measures, and compliance requirements into the platform, teams can accelerate their development cycles and reduce the risk of errors and inconsistencies.

Platform Engineers vs. SREs vs. DevOps

While platform engineering shares similarities with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps, there are distinct differences between these roles:

• Platform Engineers: Platform engineers are responsible for building and maintaining the self-service platform. They focus on creating reusable components, automating infrastructure provisioning, and providing APIs and tools that enable development teams to interact with the platform seamlessly.
• Site Reliability Engineers (SREs): SREs are primarily concerned with ensuring the reliability and performance of production systems. They work closely with development teams to implement best practices for monitoring, incident response, and capacity planning. While SREs may contribute to platform engineering efforts, their primary focus is on operational excellence.
• DevOps: DevOps is a broader cultural and organizational approach that emphasizes collaboration, automation, and continuous delivery. It encompasses the practices and principles that enable development and operations teams to work together effectively. Platform engineering can be seen as a specific implementation of DevOps principles, focusing on the infrastructure and tooling aspects.

Benefits of Introducing Platform Teams

Introducing dedicated platform teams can bring numerous benefits to organizations:

1. Increased Velocity: By providing a self-service platform, development teams can quickly provision resources, deploy applications, and iterate on features without relying on manual processes or waiting for infrastructure teams. This accelerates the development lifecycle and enables faster time-to-market.
2. Standardization and Consistency: Platform teams ensure that all applications are built and deployed using a consistent set of tools, frameworks, and best practices. This standardization reduces complexity, improves maintainability, and facilitates knowledge sharing across teams.
3. Improved Scalability and Resilience: Platform engineering focuses on designing scalable and resilient infrastructure components. By leveraging automation, infrastructure-as-code, and cloud-native technologies, platform teams can ensure that applications can handle increased traffic and recover from failures more effectively.
4. Enhanced Security and Compliance: Platform teams can bake security and compliance requirements into the platform itself. By providing secure-by-default configurations, automated security scanning, and compliance monitoring, organizations can reduce the risk of vulnerabilities and ensure adherence to industry regulations.

Platform Engineering and Team Topologies

The principles of platform engineering align well with the concepts presented in the book "Team Topologies" by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais. The book advocates for organizing teams based on the flow of change and the cognitive load required to build and operate software systems.

In the context of platform engineering, the book suggests creating a dedicated platform team that acts as an enabling team. This team focuses on providing the tools, frameworks, and infrastructure components that empower stream-aligned teams (development teams) to deliver value independently. By reducing the cognitive load on development teams and fostering a self-service culture, platform engineering enables organizations to scale their development efforts effectively.

Platform Engineering and the ING Microteams Model

The ING microteams model, pioneered by the Dutch banking giant ING, is another example of how platform engineering can be applied in practice. In this model, small, autonomous teams are responsible for building and operating their own microservices, while a central platform team provides the underlying infrastructure and tooling.

The platform team at ING focuses on creating a self-service platform that abstracts away the complexities of infrastructure provisioning, deployment, and monitoring. By empowering microteams to own their services end-to-end, ING has been able to achieve faster time-to-market, improved scalability, and increased innovation.

Conclusion

Platform engineering represents a significant shift in how organizations approach software development and delivery. By creating a self-service platform and empowering teams to build and deploy applications independently, organizations can accelerate their development cycles, improve consistency, and enhance overall system resilience.

By aligning platform engineering with the principles outlined in "Team Topologies" and learning from the success of the ING microteams model, organizations can create a culture of collaboration, autonomy, and continuous improvement. Embracing platform engineering is a key step towards achieving the agility and efficiency required to thrive in today's fast-paced digital landscape.