What is platform engineering?
Platform engineering is the practice of delivering and maintaining internal developer platforms and/or portals that provide a development team access to any resource needed to support software development work. Platform engineering teams consider the internal platform their “product” and the development team their “customers.” The top priority for a platform engineering team is accelerating developer productivity by creating a developer experience that eliminates friction and redundant manual work.
Why is platform engineering important?
High-octane development environments, agile methodologies, and talented developers are the driving forces behind innovation for today’s enterprises. However, developers can’t build applications at speed and scale in overly complex cloud environments and with suboptimal or inaccessible toolchains.
Without streamlined and simplified access to key resources and application infrastructure, enterprises will likely face issues like infrastructure sprawl, burned-out developers, overwhelmed DevOps engineering teams, increased cloud costs, and weakened governance and security posture. Taken together, these challenges slow software delivery, inflate operational costs, and hold back innovation.
To simplify increasingly convoluted infrastructure and outdated models of infrastructure delivery and management, software development teams need transformative solutions, such as platform engineering and Platform Ops.
Between now and 2030, the platform engineering services market is expected to hit nearly $24 billion, a compound annual growth rate of 23.7%. Meanwhile, according to Gartner, 8 out of 10 organizations will develop in-house platform teams to provide their developers with application development infrastructure and resources by 2026.
In this article, we’ll explore platform engineering’s key objectives and benefits, the role of a platform engineer tasked with achieving these objective, and lay out the impact on both software engineering and DevOps teams. We’ll also highlight some of the most important platform engineering tools on the market today.
How does platform engineering work?
In traditional models, developers have to submit tickets to access infrastructure-as-code (IaC), Kubernetes, and other development and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) resources. Across complex, dynamic multi-cloud and hybrid cloud architectures, this model of infrastructure delivery can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. It also goes against agile development models, as it can result in slow workflows, frustrated developers, and numerous bottlenecks across the software development lifecycle (SDLC).
Platform engineering is a discipline that involves designing and implementing an automated and unified platform to manage and deliver development infrastructure across an organization. By creating self-service capabilities for developers, the platform team optimizes the experience for running development environments while reinforcing governance, security, agility, scalability, and reliability.
As technology ecosystems become increasingly complex and multifaceted, platform engineering adoption will continue to rise. Many software development organizations are discovering that improving the developer experience via platform engineering unlocks advantages across every pillar of engineering, giving companies an invaluable edge in highly competitive and saturated markets.
Below, we’ll dive deeper into how the practice works in terms of its key objectives, but first, let’s address the platform engineering vs. DevOps discussion.
Platform engineering vs. DevOps
There is much discussion surrounding platform engineering vs. DevOps. However, software development teams shouldn’t look to choose one over the other. This is because, despite their similarities, platform engineering and DevOps are complementary and both have their own distinct advantages and applications.
Platform Engineering | DevOps | |
| Definition | Provides end-users (developers) with an internal developer platform to access critical development infrastructure and resources
| Integrates philosophies, practices, and technologies from software development and IT operations to accelerate pipelines |
| Focus areas |
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| Team composition |
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| Goals | To provide DevOps professionals with a unified and scalable platform to access development tools | To bridge the worlds of application development and IT operations to create agile, secure, fast, and collaborative CI/CD pipelines |
As you can see, platform engineering and DevOps have a lot in common, especially when looking at high-level objectives. For instance, both methodologies hinge on automation, collaboration, agility, and security. However, their focus areas, team compositions, and specific goals do slightly diverge.
Businesses should look at platform engineering as a way to optimize infrastructure delivery models for agile methodologies like DevOps. In summary, the two practices are closely interlinked, and they are both valuable to companies today.
Benefits of using platform engineering tools
Improved developer productivity
With a unified platform and robust platform engineering tools, businesses can significantly improve the developer experience. Fundamentally, this means ensuring that developers can access critical infrastructure, automate manual labor, and follow application development best practices without stress or strain.
By automating DevOps processes and providing easy and streamlined access to key development resources and infrastructure, platform engineering tools can improve developer productivity multifold.
In turn, enhanced developer productivity can result in quicker development lifecycles and a better time-to-market.
Consistency and standardization
To orchestrate heterogeneous application development infrastructure, developers are forced to compromise standardized practices. By leveraging various platform engineering tools, companies can ensure consistent and standardized development practices, processes, and technologies. This, in turn, leads to the next benefit.
Increased agility and efficiency
While agile development methodologies and strategies may work in theory, traditional DevOps processes can significantly slow things down. Platform engineering tools can help revitalize agile development strategies and inject velocity and efficiency into application lifecycles.
Enhanced collaboration
Platform engineering tools can break down development silos and address bottlenecks across the entire lifecycle. With self-service tools via a unified platform, developers can easily share critical resources and data, which helps create a culture of collaboration, communication, and cross-team innovation.
Improved scalability
In development environments, the importance of scalability can’t be overstated. Platform engineering tools ensure that businesses can scale application delivery up or down as needed without performance lags, additional expenses, or downtime.
Cloud cost optimization
The manual orchestration of disparate development tools and infrastructure leads to unnecessary expenses because of redundant resources, convoluted workflows, and poor visibility and reporting. Platform engineering tools can bring down overall cloud costs and operational expenses, in part due to the next benefit in our list.
Resource optimization
When application environments are distributed across multiple IaC resources, it can be difficult to accurately assess how developers expend resources. With strong platform engineering tools, software development and DevOps teams can achieve complete visibility across their application environments and gain an in-depth understanding of current resource utilization.
Ease of compliance
As supervisors exert more pressure on businesses to follow various industry as well as federal rules and regulations (like GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and CCPA), compliance is always a top priority.
Platform engineering tools that provide built-in governance can strengthen your compliance posture via customized policy design, automated policy enforcement, and comprehensive audit trails.
Improved security, compliance, and cost efficiency
With the risk of data breaches, regulatory compliance violations, cost inefficiencies, and configuration drift constantly looming, there’s an urgent need for standardized security, compliance, delivery, and management across application environments.
Platform engineering can make enterprises better stewards of their application environments by introducing role-based access controls, tight authentication protocols, and custom policy design and implementation.
Since the internal developer platform is the point from which developers operate all cloud-based infrastructure an environments, the platform can also enforce policies for the resources that developers deploy.
Through this approach, platform engineering can ensure all cloud resources adhere to custom standards for performance, configurations, cost efficiency, and security and compliance automatically.
Accelerating Day-2 operations
Whether routine tasks or mission-critical updates to application infrastructure, Day-2 operations can take up a significant amount of time for DevOps engineers.
A platform engineering approach can streamline Day-2 operations in a variety of ways. Platform teams can make Day-2 operations part of the developer experience, enabling software engineers, site reliability engineers, and DevOps teams to execute actions on live infrastructure in a single click.
The internal developer platform can also automate the execution of these actions. Since the platform tracks the lifecycle of the infrastructure continuously, it can also execute the scripts to perform Day-2 actions based on custom schedules (such as once per day) or in response to custom events (such as application workload needs).
Accelerating Day-2 operations further increases the value of an internal developer platform by eliminating manual work that can slow down pipelines.
Achieving visibility
Effective developer platforms can provide software development teams with unparalleled visibility into their application environments. This is essential because it allows leadership nd operations teams in DevOps and development evaluate how well resources and infrastructure delivered via the developer platform perform. It also provides a clear snapshot of who used which resource, for what purpose, and at what time.
With these real-time insights, businesses can identify and iron out inefficiencies, resource wastage, and security risks.
This level of visibility is also critical to measuring the impact of a platform engineering strategy by providing quantitative data for engagement with the internal developer platform among the teams who use it.
Optimizing cloud costs
With cloud costs rising like never before, businesses must optimize spend and rally these resources around mission-critical infrastructure and operations.
Robust IDPs enable businesses to track and proactively optimize the costs of cloud resources and infrastructure that developers access through them. Since the internal developer platform initiates the creation of cloud resources, the platform can also track the costs of those resources and automate actions based on them.
For example, this can include automating the termination of cloud resources after a duration pre-set in the platform, identifying idle resources that inflate costs, and denying the deployment of resources that violate cloud cost governance policies such as over-sized resources.
This can help organizations measure and justify the investment in an IDP. It can also help them improve their ROI for cloud services and infrastructure.
Platform engineering tools
Let’s explore a few different categories of platform engineering tools (with real-world examples) that can enhance development environments and improve the developer experience.
Infrastructure as Code tools
With Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools and platforms, businesses can automate the management and delivery of critical cloud-based development resources and infrastructure.
By using these solutions, developers don’t have to go through long processes to access critical toolchains.
Examples: Ansible, Terraform, OpenTofu, AWS CloudFormation, Quali Torque
Environment orchestration tools
These solutions allow developers to provision complete application environments based on templates. Other key capabilities of environment orchestration tools include automating various actions, enforcing cloud governance, optimizing costs, and tracking activities.
Examples: Quali Torque
Generative AI to automate basic tasks
Platform teams are increasingly embracing generative AI to eliminate manual work that slows down DevOps and development teams. For example, Quali Torque users leverage generative AI to generate, design, and modify code to provision cloud infrastructure and environments, which can then be reused as blueprints and accessed via an internal developer portal. This helps to eliminate the manual coding and orchestration to build development environments, while also providing the engineering team with control over which resources are provisioned via the portal.
Examples: Quali Torque
Monitoring tools
Monitoring tools offer complete visibility into and metrics on how developers use the organization’s unified development platform. They enable businesses to constantly improve their development platforms and environments.
Examples: Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk
Container orchestration tools
This category provides developers with a powerful and seamless way to unify disparate containerized technologies, services, and infrastructure.
Examples: Helm, Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Amazon ECS
CI/CD tools
CI/CD tools support developers across the entire software development lifecycle. Developers use them to build, test, and deploy applications at speed and scale without sacrificing performance, security, and reliability.
Examples: Jenkins, TeamCity, Azure DevOps, CircleCI, GitHub Actions
Security management tools
Solutions for security management are among the most critical platform engineering tools because data breaches can undo the work of even the most high-performance application environments.
These tools focus on monitoring application environments, scanning code and other resources for vulnerabilities, optimizing identity and access management (IAM), and streamlining threat detection and incident response.
Examples: AWS IAM, Microsoft Entra ID
Summary
For most organizations, success depends on the quality, productivity, and speed of their developers. While agile methodologies are in full flow, they often feature suboptimal models of infrastructure delivery. This affects every aspect of the SDLC, including developer productivity and morale.
Platform engineering is a discipline that counters these growing challenges, building unified platforms from which developers can easily and securely access development resources.
Some critical platform engineering tools covered in this article include infrastructure provisioning, environment orchestration, monitoring, container orchestration, CI/CD, and security management tools. With these solutions consolidated and standardized in a unified platform like Quali Torque, businesses can unlock tremendous value and unleash the full capabilities of their developers.
Quali Torque is a powerful platform engineering tool that helps businesses provide their developers with unparalleled self-service infrastructure and toolchains for application development. It’s a comprehensive solution that boosts developer productivity and builds agile and standardized development environments. Best of all, Quali Torque can do this while saving precious costs and resources, as well as improving your security and compliance posture.
Empower your developers and transform your development environments with Quali Torque. Visit our Playground to learn more today.