Mastering the Art of Platform Engineering: Building Future-Ready Solutions
Platform engineering is a technique for developing and implementing a collection of tools designed to improve and speed up the processes of developing and disseminating software. Platform engineers are responsible for implementing activities such as creating CI/CD pipelines, creating staging environments, and setting Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to automate cloud resource provisioning to help application developers in their work. These are just a few duties that platform engineers often do.
You will understand platform engineering by reading this article and how it varies from related ideas like SRE and DevOps. Here, we’ll go through a number of platform engineering best practises and show how putting them into practises may enhance your software operations.
What duties does a platform engineer have?
Developer-facing resources are created and improved by platform engineers. They provide a concentrated setting for developing, testing, and refining system changes. Since it’s unlikely that a single developer would be able to recreate your whole infrastructure, the “platform” acts as a bridge between them and your system.
User-controlled platform access is one example of a characteristic that defines good platform engineering. Developers need to be able to utilise the tools they want without always requiring assistance from groups like Operations and Infrastructure.
Having to get permission before establishing a new staging environment is a bottleneck that slows down development. Developers, on the other hand, may have more control over their work by isolating it with a single terminal command. They don’t have to put their productive work on hold while they wait for the infrastructure or figure out how it will be provided.
Platform Design and Construction Principles
Platform engineering is an approach that integrates a variety of tools and methodologies to provide programmers an all-inclusive environment:
Infrastructure Automation Using IaaS Control requires an automated, scalable mechanism. The platform’s look is defined by IaC tools, which also make it possible to quickly create new instances. Reducing the amount of manual effort is a frequent approach for streamlining the development process.
Ensure that you execute your job properly
The platform should be created in a way that addresses the problems that programmers run across most often. Focus on meeting the specific requirements of your teams rather than attempting to enhance aspects that are currently effective. It’s also not advised to build your own source control or continuous integration system. However, by offering a way that can duplicate your production architecture into a staging environment, you may be able to save engineers time and effort.
Access without interacting with others
Everything on the platform should operate as if it were a resource that the designers could utilise whatever they pleased. In essence, you are giving programmers a toolkit full of controls to utilise anyway they see suitable. It’s best to avoid dictating precise use patterns to engineers since their methods of functioning may vary considerably from one another.
Ongoing development and evolution
The features that end users engage with should be developed with the same product-driven mentality that you used to create the platform. Even if internal programmers are the “customer,” it’s still important to provide changes as quickly as possible so the platform can accommodate their requirements. This guarantees that software developers will remain effective for a very long period.
Conclusion
Each of these guidelines aims to make the whole development process more efficient. Platform engineers are in charge of comprehending developer needs and giving them the appropriate toolchains.
