CWDN series: DevEx – D2iQ: The platform engineering experience
This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Developer Network written Deepak Goel, CTO of D2iQ.
With many pressures being put on them, DevOps teams simply can’t keep up with the Ops demands.
This is why platform engineering is gaining momentum, as it advocates for building a centrally managed developer platform shared by multiple teams, instead of having each team build and run its own platform.
This approach ensures that critical infrastructure tasks like security, governance and observability are done once and done right, instead of being haphazard and duplicate efforts.
To maximise developer productivity, the platform engineering team must manage the infrastructure and create an internal platform for developers.
This removes much of the operational burden from the developers, allowing them to focus on building business applications. Platform engineering solves the complexity and skills gap challenges by providing a ready-made internal developer platform and “golden path” for DevOps teams, enabling them to devote their labor to creating business value rather than struggling to build a container management platform.
The workforce is no longer dependent on the infrastructure and there is one process for managing an organisation’s fleet instead of operational silos and duplicate efforts.
Abstraction & automation
Deepak Goel, CTO of D2iQ.
Concurrently, the internal developer platform provides the abstraction and automation that helps developers build, test and deploy applications easily. Consider a scenario where there are multiple DevOps teams working on different projects within an organisation.
Each DevOps team will choose its own infrastructure, from the cloud to on-premise based on their needs. They will use their own tools and scripts to manage the lifecycle of the infrastructure, including provisioning and upgrades. They will also have their own measures for security, resulting in a structure that creates a self-service environment.
However, without platform engineering and internal developer platforms, it often leads to redundancy in operational efforts.
Each team has to execute the same lifecycle operations for their own infrastructure, creating silos that ultimately lead to the uneconomical use of infrastructure resources. Including DevOps within the framework of platform engineering brings standardisation and consistency, while maintaining the self-service environment DevOps teams have come to expect. In the above scenario, platform engineering teams centralise many of the operations needed to manage the lifecycle of the infrastructure, ensuring optimal use of the infrastructure resources by sharing them across various teams.
In addition, this approach provides a self-service internal developer platform environment within the security guardrails established by the platform engineering team.
Platform engineering makes developers more productive while simultaneously avoiding any pitfalls, improving an organization’s overall ROI.