DevOps and platform engineering are great contributors to seamless application development and delivery. These terms may have been waltzing in your business or tech circles, and that leads you to ponder: Are DevOps and platform engineering just two sides of the same coin? Or are they so distinctly different that once you have adapted once, you cannot afford to change course and adapt to the other?
There are certainly many similarities in how DevOps and platform engineering impact your application development and delivery process. But when you truly explore the functions and purposes of DevOps and platform engineering, you can spot the nuances between these two functions in businesses and organizations. Are you already “doing DevOps” when you have a developer team? If you have started to take care of what tools and infrastructures the rest of the team are using, are you now a platform engineer? More importantly, what distinct advantages do DevOps and platform engineering each offer that can transform your business trajectory?
This article will help you demystify these two pivotal methodologies, understand their similarities and differences, and finally, offer insight as to how you can leverage the benefits of the specific features of DevOps and platform engineering to enhance your application delivery process.
What is DevOps?
Traditionally, application development and operation teams worked separately, which created workflow silos. The application delivery process was often out of sync and the communication cumbersome, sometimes even taking weeks of back-and-forth emailing to make a few changes and deploy. In 2016, Werner Vogels, the Chief Technology Officer at Amazon, famously put the “you build it, you run it” philosophy in the spotlight. Since then, the idea of DevOps has picked up and gained popularity among businesses, where the development (Dev) and the operations (Ops) teams collaborate and work together closely. DevOps emphasizes the importance of continuous integration(CI), continuous delivery(CD) and automation in the workflow. Applications and software are built, tested, deployed and maintained quicker and more frequently. As increased automation in the workflow minimizes human errors, applications can be delivered faster, more consistently and more reliably.
But DevOps is more than just a set of tools; it represents a mindset change and a cultural shift in teams and businesses – it promotes transparency and collaboration among teams, shared ownership and responsibilities throughout the whole operation and fosters a culture of learning and experimentation from the top up. Moreover, application delivery teams who adapted DevOps are more flexible and agile to changing requirements and new technologies. DevOps essentially supports a mindset of continuous improvement and agility, as well as creative and collaborative problem-solving.
Drawbacks of DevOps
As DevOps engineering becomes a more common industry practice, developers are forced to take on more responsibilities beyond their initial scope of work. For instance, they have to master an ever-growing number of technologies and tools in the evolving markets or are required to extend their knowledge to scalability challenges, microservices architectures, cloud services, etc. All the expectations eventually become a strenuous information-and-cognitive overload, which compromises productivity, product quality and general work satisfaction.
Benefits of DevOps
DevOps offers a variety of benefits, including the following:
- Faster Time to Market: With the help of continuous integration and delivery, DevOps ensures a much faster application development and deployment workflow. The speedy delivery of updates and products in response to market needs is vital for staying competitive in many industries.
- Enhanced Efficiency by Automation: Automation is a core principle of DevOps. Through automating repetitive tasks such as testing, deployment and monitoring, application development and delivery is faster and more reliable, with minimal human errors, leading to more reliable and consistent outputs.
- Better Collaboration and Communication: DevOps essentially breaks down the silos between the development and operations teams for application delivery. The DevOps approach encourages closer collaboration between teams, fostering a culture of transparency.
- Smarter Resource Allocation and Lower Costs: DevOps’ emphasis on automation and streamlining of workflows ensures that there is a smarter and more efficient use of resources, and in the long run, also a reduced need for manual intervention and as a result, lower operational costs.
What is Platform Engineering?
Platform engineering focuses on designing, building and maintaining a self-service platform, with centralization features, where standardization of workflows and tools enables developers to build, test, deploy, monitor and manage application delivery more efficiently and reliably. It also allows easy scalability as business grows. Platform engineering supports and acceleration of the whole application development and delivery processes by streamlining CI/CD, automating deployment, ensuring good governance and security, improving visibility throughout all teams, and, most importantly, lessening the cognitive load of developers.
Simply put, if application development and delivery were like creating new dishes and running a restaurant, then the developers would be the cooks. The platform engineering team, in this scenario, would be the ones making sure the kitchen is in top shape, that all tools are sharpened and prepared in advance, that the recipes are prepared in one place, and workflows are perfectly designed according to the needs of the cooks and the overall business goals. They are there to ensure a well-maintained environment, so there is high transparency in the process, from performance monitoring to product building to managing hiccups. The cooks now get to focus on developing existing new dishes with top quality and the restaurant can scale up and expand, knowing there is a robust foundation and self-service platform in place.
And everyone in the team gets to focus on what he/she is good at and is supposed to do.
Benefits of Platform Engineering
Many reports and research have shown significant and measurable benefits platform engineering brings to organizations and businesses. In the latest State of Platform Engineering Survey published by Puppet, 94% of respondents agreed that platform engineering has helped their organizations better realize the benefits of DevOps. They have reported seeing improvements in system reliability (60%), greater productivity and efficiency(59%), and higher workflow standards (57%). Many agreed that platform engineering has proven to make their developers’ lives easier and better.
Apart from these benefits, platform engineering can also:
- Greatly reduce developer’s cognitive load through standardization
- Enhance developer and team productivity
- Improve scalability and reliability
- Maintain consistency and good governance
- Better security, fewer human errors
- Optimize cost-effectiveness and encourage innovation
Platform Engineering Challenges
Platform engineering doesn’t just happen overnight, and one platform solution does not fit all. To fully reap the benefits of platform engineering, the platforms themselves need to be treated like a product – they need to be designed with the users in mind. As platform engineering helps with the deployment, operation, and monitoring of the DevOps cycle, platform engineering tools that are built without the collaboration of DevOps can fumble. This leads to frustration from the developers, wasted investment, and reduced ROI. Moreover, resources need to be dedicated to maintain platform performance consistently, so the functionality can be enhanced and evolved over time. To go back to the kitchen analogy, a world-class kitchen is only successful if everyone is committed to keeping it functioning, with expert support.
DevOps Vs. Platform Engineering: How are They Different in Application Development & Delivery?
The fundamental difference between DevOps and platform engineering is quite apparent – DevOps is a mindset and concept that brings the development and operations team together, so their workflow is more streamlined, optimized, and automated. Platform engineering, on the other hand, orientates itself to the designing and maintaining a platform, through which cognitive loads can be lifted off through the standardization of workflows and tooling.
DevOps Vs. Platform Engineering Overview
Simple Comparison of DevOps & Platform Engineering
Let’s dive deep into how DevOps and Platform are different:
Primary Focus
DevOps: DevOps is a concept that primarily focuses on the process of application development and delivery. It involves the full lifecycle of planning, coding, testing, release, deployment, and monitoring. with DevOps technologies, applications are often developed and delivered, to external users and clients with features and updates.
Platform Engineering: Platform engineering‘s main focus lies on designing, building, and maintaining the platforms on which applications are developed. The role of platform engineers is to ensure the security, stability, and efficiency of the platforms, which are mostly used internally, so to ultimately support a seamless, smart, and secure application delivery.
Objectives and Goals
DevOps: DevOps’ main objectives are to leverage the power of automation to simplify, streamline, and accelerate the application delivery process. In doing so, they aim to eradicate silos between the Dev and Ops teams, enable shared ownership, improve the visibility of the pipelines, and increase agility in the application development and delivery process. How does success look like for DevOps? A seamless, error-free application delivery, that is quick to respond to the wishes and desires of the market and application users.
Platform Engineering: As platform engineers’ responsibilities focus on building and maintaining a platform, their daily objectives involve identifying the needs and wants of the various teams in the company who will benefit from the platform, determining and managing tooling and workflows, and managing a stable platform for developing and deploying infrastructure.
Their work is continuous as they have to adapt quickly to rising business challenges and react rapidly to any technical misshapes of the platform. The ultimate goal of platform engineers is to provide a stable and scalable platform for tech and business teams to simplify the development, deployment and project management of the application delivery process, and eventually optimize their business impact and efficiency.
Mindset
DevOps: Since the ultimate goal is the prompt delivery of high-quality applications, DevOps teams have their eyes on the applications themselves and are required to be project-oriented. However, as DevOps teams have been increasingly expected to deal with the ever-growing amount of tools and infrastructures, as well as the need to adapt to all business needs while also ensuring all documentation is up-to-date, the cognitive load on the DevOps team is growing to be beyond their initial scope of work.
Platform Engineering: Platform engineers are product-oriented. To ensure platform engineering success, platform engineers need to listen to the challenges from the Dev, Ops, and business teams and understand what kind of platform needs to be designed and built. They are also responsible for explaining the platform to all the internal teams and helping to shift their mindset. The Platform engineers are essentially the glue maker, who holds all of the teams that are involved in the application delivery process together.
Is Platform Engineering Better Than DevOps for Application Development?
It is hard to compare whether an orange is better than a carrot, as they are essentially different things although they are good for you when consumed in healthy doses. At their core, both DevOps and platform engineering serve to create better application delivery experiences. While DevOps focuses on accelerating application development, platform engineering can serve as a sturdy foundation and a boost to supercharge an already existing DevOps operation, offering smart solutions for reliable scalability and eradicating cognitive loads of the DevOps team.
However, if you truly understand what platform engineering is, you would also know not everyone can benefit from having a platform engineering team. Why?
Do You Need Platform Engineering?
Before jumping on the platform engineering wagon, you need to consider whether your investment will be impactful. From our experience, adapting to platform engineering is the most effective in boosting application development and application delivery efficiency if:
- Your company has a clear business objective and goal with prioritising digital transformation;
- You have multiple, cross-function teams that are involved in the application delivery process and you can see the potential of confusion, overloading, and miscommunication.
- Your business has regular deployment needs. If your teams do not need to deploy frequently, platform engineering is not the right approach for optimization.
- You are committed to scaling up your business and need to do it fast. You have a tested product or service and you need help scaling up your operation rapidly, but also keeping human errors to a minimum.
You are familiar with DevOps and the agile working culture. Platform engineering complements and reinforces DevOps practices, so your teams need to be ready for agile feedback and innovation.
Do I Need Platform Engineering and How Can I Start?
Do you want to know if and how platform engineering can help you optimize your application delivery performance? RE:FORM is an All-In-One Platform Engineering Tool that offers smart, self-service and scalable solutions to supercharge your software and application delivery from start to finish. Contact our team for a free consultation to see how we can help you accelerate your business success with platform engineering.
