There has been a lot of discussion about Platform Engineering lately. From being dubbed as the ‘next stage of the DevOps evolution’ to the ‘substitution of SRE,’ it stirred contentious conversations around the future of Ops. However, its scope, capabilities, and application now testify that neither of the two judgments is (completely) true. Together they ensure smooth software development and delivery, and issue-free run of production systems.
Its ability to enable organizations to build and manage scalable and robust platforms for their software applications has made it a critical part of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Moreover, as businesses strive to scale their operations to meet growing demands, Platform Engineering has become the de facto approach to achieving the goal.
In this article, we will explore how Platform Engineering is helping businesses scale quickly in the realm of technology and infrastructure.
Faster Deployment of Apps: Platform Engineering accelerates the development and delivery of applications and the pace at which they deliver business value. Automated processes and self-service infrastructure help organizations to continually move forward on the features prioritized by business and market needs. It enables organizations to respond to market demands quickly, seize new opportunities, and stay ahead of the competition. The modular and flexible architectures allow organizations to add or remove components and scale their technology infrastructure quickly and efficiently.
Improving Developer Productivity: Platform Engineering alleviates the cognitive load of the developers and allows them to focus on their core tasks of building applications, delivering customer value, and driving business outcomes. The Platform Engineering team design and maintain Internal Developer Platforms (IDP), toolchains, underlying infrastructures and workflows that support engineers to build and deploy software applications that are stable, flexible, and scalable.
Cloud-Native Technologies: Platform Engineering is a powerful practice for scaling up software delivery processes without sacrificing quality, security, and efficiency. It leverages the power of cloud-native technologies to let organizations increase or decrease IT resources as per their needs. The Platform Engineering team’s high reliance on Cloud systems allows it to support application development and its demanding workloads while maintaining its required performance levels.
Providing Modular And Scalable Architecture: The platform engineering team emphasizes the development of a modular and scalable architecture that provides the foundation for building and deploying products. These scalable designs ensure that developers get to deploy new code to production more frequently and reliably without compromising overall system stability.
Moreover, Platform Engineering adopts an API-first approach that empowers developers to build new services on top of the platform while not disturbing the underlying infrastructure.
Conclusion
Growth is important, but how an organization handles growth is even more important. An organization must understand when and how to expand (or scale down) its business operations to accommodate the market demand.
Platform Engineering teams understand business and developer requirements and use this knowledge to design and build scalable and efficient solutions that help the organization grow. They put automated infrastructure and tools at the service of developers to improve their experience and help them build products that respond to market demands quickly and efficiently. The Platform Engineering team works closely with the development teams to learn about the tools and frameworks that they use and the challenges they face in performing their daily tasks. Based on the gathered insights, Platform Engineers design and build solutions that alleviate the pain points of the developers' team.
In summary, the platform engineering team provide developers with modular and scalable infrastructure that supports rapid growth and meets the evolving needs of the customers. It empowers the enterprise to quickly deliver new features and products to the market, scale and seize opportunities to stay ahead of the competition. By leveraging the standardized architectures built by the Platform Engineering Teams, developers can focus on their core competencies and deliver value to the end users and drive business success.
