Platform engineering: DevOps evolved?

February 23, 2023

DevOps

Platform engineering: DevOps evolved?

In 2022, platform engineering (PE) was identified as one of the greatest DevOps trends for emerging technologies. In the next three years, 75% of IT companies will use platform engineering for software development and deployment.

With all that media and industry attention to platform engineering, much skepticism still exists regarding what PE is and how it differs from the old good DevOps. Is it just the next DevOps evolution step? Or, maybe, a platform engineer is a new title for an IT position with a higher salary?

At Profisea, we know that features making platform engineering so trendy are quite delicate. Thus, in this article, we will speak about what platform engineering is, how it becomes effective within your SDLC, and why combining DevOps and PE makes your business succeed. Let’s get it started!

Platform engineering: ultimate automation plus autonomy

The growing complexity of present-day software, built of loosely coupled elements inside multiple containers that require a piece of very special knowledge, resulted in arising of platform engineering.

The Platform Engineers community evangelizes PE as:

The discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations in the cloud-native era… covering the operation necessities of the entire life cycle of an application.

Platform engineering automates infrastructure and helps developers work more productively and autonomously, reaching tools on-demand and with no waiting for colleagues to assist. It equips software engineers with direct and secure access to CI/CD pipelines where they just write code and run it:

Simply speaking, platform engineering streamlines all the development and deployment tasks: building CI/CD pipelines, managing development processes, testing production environments and frameworks, automating deployments, logging, monitoring, etc.

Platform engineering benefits: value the human, add the value

Platform engineering is much more than pure automation and acceleration. It brings sufficient benefits for companies that are on their way to cloud transformation, including:

Eventually, platform engineering shields developers from infrastructure issues. Leveraging infrastructure as code along with other DevOps tools, PE improves SDLC pipelines and allows getting code to production as securely and at high speed as never before.

DevOps evolved, re-branded, or… hybrid?

Adopting new trends doesn’t necessarily mean the complete refusal of old approaches. Profisea has witnessed, that the most successful companies combine different philosophies, building productive SDLC pipelines, and taking the best from DevOps, SRE, NOC, ALM, FinOps, etc.

Moreover, according to the research, there is a firm correspondence between the level of DevOps adoption and the use of platform engineering inside a company:

Platform engineering

Here we speak about the so-called hybrid approach when the benefits of DevOps methodology and platform engineering are consolidated to improve business productivity and velocity. In this case, platform engineering provides automatization in building CI/CD pipelines, managing development processes, testing, logging, and monitoring while DevOps engineers come up with an understanding of how those frameworks should be applied and manage the company’s production infrastructure.

DevOps evolved, re-branded, or combined – no matter how you name it – assists a business to take the best of both platform engineering and classic DevOps. While platform engineering allows seeing the scale from concept through to realization and provides frameworks, DevOps focuses on details, optimizes SDLC pipelines, and delivers software at high velocity.

Profisea: supporting your business cloud transformation

Both platform engineering and DevOps are quite complicated. Can they be done unprofessionall  y? Absolutely! That’s why you should address highly experienced professionals to create and support your business processes at every stage of the cloud journey.

Profisea is an Israeli boutique DevOps company providing a full spectrum of cloud management services, from smart customization of existing cloud Infrastructures to end-to-end cloud infrastructure designing & optimization that meets your vision and unique business requirements. Our experienced engineers created the most comprehensive AI-driven cloud cost reduction platform that can save up to 75% of your monthly cloud bills via rich network visibility, AI-generated policies, and detailed actionable reports.

Contact us for a free consultation – and we will help your business transform organizational mindset, increase productivity, save costs and boost performance!

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