Platform Engineering 101 — Part 1
Platform engineering isn’t some new trend or tool that just popped up. We’ve been building and managing platforms for years — we just didn’t have a specific name for it until recently.
At its core, platform engineering is about creating a set of principles and tools that help an organization manage its software processes more effectively. Think of it as a “golden path” that both technical and non-technical teams can follow to get things done. And it’s not just about developers. While improving developer experience (DevEx) is a key goal, I believe platform engineering should support everyone — from product owners to testers and business analysts. It’s about making the entire team more productive and aligned, not just the developers.
Here is what ChatGPT has to say on this topic.
Platform engineering helps reduce the formation of “Shadow ITs” within the organization and provides a gateway to get things started in a standardized fashion. Its designed to reduce the “Cognitive Load” that most people face when trying to solve a problem.
Cognitive load refers to the amount of mental effort and working memory resources required to learn, understand, or perform a task.
So what are the main benefits of platform engineering?
- Increased Developer Productivity: By providing self-service tools, developers can get their environments set up faster and start coding without waiting for manual support.
- Consistency and Best Practices: Standardization across environments reduces errors and promotes the use of best practices across teams.
- Faster Time to Market: Automated and streamlined processes enable quicker deployment and faster iterations, leading to reduced time to market.
- Reduced Operational Overhead: By automating repetitive tasks and providing robust internal platforms, operational overhead is minimized.
Key components of platform engineering include a mix of tools and systems that make everything run smoothly and efficiently:
- Control Plane: This includes the interfaces we use every day — like web portals, APIs, CLIs, project templates, IDEs, and documentation. It’s where everything comes together, including version control to manage changes.
- Monitoring & Logging: These tools help track and understand what’s happening behind the scenes. With tracing, logs, and analytics, teams can identify issues early and ensure everything is running as expected.
- Security & Identity: Critical for protecting systems, this includes managing secrets, identities, policies, and auditing tools to ensure that everything is secure and compliant.
- Resources: The backbone of the platform, covering compute, storage, networking, messaging, and services. These resources provide the power and infrastructure needed for applications to run efficiently.
- AI: More and more, AI is becoming a key part of platform engineering. It includes chatbots, AI agents, fine-tuned language models, and integrations with third-party AI services to enhance automation and decision-making.
These components work together to build a well-rounded, reliable platform.
Platform engineering is like a Swiss Army Knife — it’s a central tool that helps solve a variety of problems. The goal is to create an efficient, scalable environment that makes life easier for development teams while keeping applications stable and running smoothly in production.
But like any solution, platform engineering has its challenges. In my next article, I’ll cover some of the common pitfalls, mistakes, and downsides you should be aware of when implementing it.
References:
- Platform Engineering: https://platformengineering.org/blog/what-is-platform-engineering
- DevEx: https://github.blog/enterprise-software/collaboration/developer-experience-what-is-it-and-why-should-you-care/
- Cognitive Load: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/cognitive-load?srsltid=AfmBOooMGa5abRDTh9uJs_ZDXBu0l6ich-u_mHPI1dAF6rogdK07cZ2G
