What is Platform Engineering?
Platform engineering is a new discipline that has emerged in response to the growing complexity of our modern day Cloud-native architectures. It can be called as a practice of building and maintaining an integrated product, which we call as “Internal Developer Platform” (IDP) ,which acts as a flexible and supported abstraction layer between developers and the underlying technologies of their applications.
Platform engineering is a process or an art that combines several tools and technologies which streamlines the software development and delivery process and help decrease the mental load on individual contributors, enabling self-service platforms for developers and other staeholders.
Platform engineers bring the necessary tools for deploying and running applications and formalize their usage across the entire team. In other terms, platform engineering encompasses everything that is a part of the application’s non-functional requirements.
A platform engineer’s responsibilities are to organize, create, and maintain the infrastructure that supports the DevOps of software applications. Nowadays, platform engineering is becoming a trend because it guarantees to provide the best experience for developers and speeds up the product team. They also help developers work more efficiently by implementing CI/CD pipelines and configuring IaC (Infrastructure as Code) to automate cloud resources.
The above images show how both platform engineering and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) are properly suited for the development team. Once these tools receive more features, application developers must work on these features. Subsequently, both the platform engineering team and the Infrastructure as Code team collaborate.
Who is a Platform Engineer?
A platform engineer’s responsibility is to build the tools needed in the development and operations process for organizing, executing & managing the infrastructure. These engineers also work at the junction of IT operations & software development, concentrating on developing an automated workflow to help the develeopers, sysadmins, security teams and other stakeholders with a se Platform engineers have to work with software developers, stakeholders, and system administrators to get to know their needs and secure them to fulfill their needs with the help of tools and platforms.
The platform engineer’s responsibilities depends upon the need of the organization, and some of the common responsibilities may include:
