What Is Platform Engineering, And What Makes It Different?
You've probably heard the term platform engineering mentioned a lot recently. Platform engineering is a relatively new term that has been garnering a lot of attention, and rightfully so.
There are subtle differences between platform engineering and DevOps.
These differences mainly come from their primary focus, how the process is presented, and implementation strategies. But as experts in the DevOps space, we see Platform Engineering as the next clear evolution.
Read on to improve your understanding of the differences—which will help you decide which provider will be the best fit for your needs.
What Is Platform Engineering?
Platform engineering is managing and optimizing the software delivery and development process to enable self-service capabilities.
This benefits both SRE and DevOps and supports all aspects of software development and software development teams. The end goal is to create a product that's easy to use even with limited-to-no knowledge of the underlying infrastructure.
Platform engineering focuses on creating and implementing reliable platform engineering tools with self-service capabilities and automated infrastructure. This can improve developer productivity while also making internal developer platforms more usable for non-developers.
Put another way, platform engineers create automated and self-service capabilities that reduce cognitive load by helping clients who are unfamiliar with more complex infrastructure.
A platform team will provide best practices and make it easier to take ownership of their internal developer platform once contracted work is complete.
For example, our platform engineering team at OpSourced are experts in defining and architecting effective tooling and automation that are essential to your business' success. Our platform team will provide best practices and make it easier to take ownership of internal developer platform once our contracted work is complete.
How Are Platform Engineering, DevOps, and SRE Different?
Software development terms might leave you wondering what the difference between DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering is.
Although the terms are interrelated, they mean slightly different things.
1. Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
Site reliability engineering (SRE) is a term that was originally used by Google and has become an industry standard for explaining how sites are maintained.
SRE typically includes altering and monitoring practices and focuses on service-level objectives built into systems and later SRE platforms.
2. DevOps
DevOps is a set of practices and methodologies that combines software development and web operations.
DevOps practices and methodologies are the backbone of the infrastructure and workflows, giving more power, flexibility, and visibility to software developers, platform teams, and SRE teams.
DevOps practices also support quicker developer iterations by making more frequent deploys faster and safer for all team members.
3. Platform Engineering
Platform engineering is typically used to describe a combined approach using all DevOps practices.
Platform engineering teams focus on building automation and management tooling around every layer of the infrastructure, deployment, and visibility tooling to the degree that it becomes simple to orient and manage for anyone in your organization while limiting the surface area for undesirable or accidental outcomes.
Think of the simplicity of installing an application on Windows or Mac, or look at the level of resource usage that application has. Platform engineering brings that level of simplicity to your cloud-deployed applications.
Although there are similarities between platform engineering, SRE, and DevOps, there are also elements that differentiate them from each other. However, we believe there should be less of a focus on comparing platform engineering vs. DevOps vs. SRE and more of a focus on how the different aspects can work together.
For example, at OpSourced, we use DevOps best practices in all of our projects, combining the best of DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering aspects learned from our long history of building and supporting infrastructures and clients.
While the industry is always developing new terms to explain what we do, platform engineering has been part of our services for over 17 years.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is platform engineering in simple terms?
Platform engineering is managing and optimizing the software delivery and development process to enable self-service capabilities.
What is platform engineering vs DevOps?
Platform engineers create automated and self-service capabilities that reduce cognitive load by helping clients who are unfamiliar with more complex infrastructure. DevOps is a set of practices and methodologies that combines software development and web operations.
In Closing
By using DevOps best practices to build out a solid set of workflows and automation around managing infrastructure, you free up your team to concentrate on the important business of focusing on your customers.
At the end of the day, that's the most impactful thing they can be doing, and any time spent struggling with antiquated systems and processes or bogged down by the friction of navigating complicated cloud management systems is time stolen directly from your customers.
Want the best of what internal platform teams can bring to the table but want to keep overhead costs down?
Let our DevOps agency help you implement your own Platform Engineering and DevOps practices in your organization.
OpSourced offers all of these services and more through our DevOps as a Service and DevOps Consulting packages.
Contact us today to learn how our approach will enable developers to optimize infrastructure and set your company up for overall success.