Platform engineering essentials: Core principles and tips for getting started

What distinguishes high-achieving organizations from those that are less successful?

How do the leading teams empower their developers to maintain and run applications and services autonomously, without constant assistance from more experienced team members? The answer lies within: they establish a platform team dedicated to adopting an Internal Developer Portal (IDP).

That’s the strategy exemplary engineering organizations adopt—they form internal platform teams, which craft IDPs tailored for their developers.

With these IDPs, developers can select the appropriate level of abstraction for running their applications and services, based on what suits them best.

For those who enjoy delving into Helm charts, YAML files, and Terraform modules? They have the freedom to do so.

Conversely, if you have a junior front-end developer indifferent to whether the app is hosted on EKS or another environment, perfect—they can independently set up a fully equipped environment that allows them to deploy and test their code without fretting about the underlying infrastructure.

Here are some guiding principles that consistently emerge in high-functioning platform teams and organizations centered around self-service:

1. A definite mission and well-defined role

It’s critical for a platform team to have a well-articulated mission, such as “Establish robust workflows enabling engineers to self-manage their infrastructure and applications autonomously.”

It’s key to define this early on. Equally vital is crystallizing the platform team’s role—not as an on-call service deploying environments but as a product team serving the needs of its internal clients.

2. View your platform as a product

Elaborating on treating the platform like a product, the platform team should adopt a product-oriented outlook. The focus should be on delivering genuine value to their main users, the app developers, informed by their input.

Prioritize deploying features driven by this user feedback over experimenting with the latest tech trend just for its novelty.

3. Address widespread issues

By solving problems that recur across the company, platform teams save others from wasting effort on addressing the same issues repeatedly.

Identify these shared challenges: start with what’s slowing down developers and collect insights from their experiences as well as analyzing engineering KPIs quantitatively.

4. Recognize the value of ‘glue’

Platform teams are sometimes mistakenly viewed as mere cost centers since they don’t release features aimed at the end-user, acting instead as a unifying agent for different systems. However, this ‘glue’ is essential. It’s crucial for platform engineers to communicate their contributions and internal worth.

Once optimal paths are established, a primary benefit provided by the platform team is to efficiently integrate the toolchain and facilitate seamless self-service processes for engineers.

5. Avoid duplication of efforts

Just as platform teams deter other departments from constantly recreating solutions for known problems, they must also be mindful of not doing the same. Pursuing a homemade CI/CD system may seem advantageous now, but commercial alternatives will evolve to compete.

Platform teams should distinguish what truly sets them apart. Instead of constructing in-house tools that vie with specialized vendors who have far greater resources, the focus should be on leveraging external products to suit the unique needs of the organization, considering that these vendors generally aim to meet the broader market’s general requirements.

How to get started with platform engineering

The blueprint for “the platform” is not one-size-fits-all; it changes with every organization. The smartest way to start your platform engineering journey is by engaging in dialogue with your engineering team. Initiating the conversation might take the form of a simple survey pinpointing delays or points of developer frustration, or it could include platform engineers participating in pair programming alongside application teams.

Begin architecting your platform by evaluating the tools currently in use, such as Slack, Trello, and Jira. Investigate areas with frequent issues or user requests.

Focus on tasks that developers find monotonous and repetitive, and pinpoint where the bulk of your grind is. Tackling these common pain points should be your initial target.

Remember, it’s crucial to continually gather feedback from your internal developer community when you’re implementing your platform, boosting platform adoption, and fine-tuning as you progress. Overcommunication is key.

Engage your internal users with sneak peeks of the product, perhaps over a complimentary lunch. Encourage trial amongst your developers with rewards. And always, make sure you’re documenting your platform thoroughly to promote autonomous use.

It’s equally important to consider the perspective of other key players, such as aligning the platform with the business outcomes that matter to your executives. Clear communication about the platform’s aims and benefits to your C-suite is vital, or you might find its adoption stalled from the start.

Thoughts on preparing for platform engineering

For nearly a generation, DevOps has dominated the world of software development and operations. It is a set of skills and methodologies that no developer can do without.

Pearl Zhu described its importance in her book ‘The Digital Master’, highlighting that “Agile and DevOps are for harnessing integration, interaction, and innovation.”

This is especially important in today’s hyper-competitive market, where IT management teams are under huge pressure to deliver the next innovative technological solution.

But change is in the air.

As organizations look to move faster and take steps to make developers’ lives easier DevOps is moving towards a more standardized approach – platform engineering. This evolution in software development methodology reflects the need for improved consistency and alignment, now being adopted across organizations. While not wholly new, it signifies meaningful progress in how we design, build, and deliver software.

This transition creates opportunities to optimize processes in this modern era of technology. Businesses should thoughtfully strategize their integration of platform engineering alongside DevOps, ensuring that they streamline and automate processes efficiently while continuing to leverage the expertise of DevOps engineers when necessary.

Although platform engineering aims to reduce the frequency of complex scripting tasks that require dedicated DevOps professionals, it doesn’t replace the discipline itself. The objective is to optimize resource allocation so that organizations may rely on a smaller, more focused team of DevOps engineers for the delivery of applications.

Thus, the emphasis rests more on enhancing existing investments rather than an outright replacement. With prudent change management and training, there is an opportunity to take DevOps sophistication to the next level.

For organizations to embrace this forward-thinking model, coordinated action is crucial.

Steps include:

• Evaluating and synchronizing existing methods
• Identifying what the platform should achieve
• Updating skills for evolving technologies
• Encouraging a culture of transparency, quick learning, and end-user concentration
• Phased introduction of platform features
• Continuous enhancement of the platform based on user feedback

Implementing platform engineering

Platform engineering is transitioning from a concept with great potential to a practical, actionable strategy. The trend towards increased standardization, accelerated delivery, and the empowerment of developers is becoming evident in organizations that have adopted this approach.

The narratives of enterprises that have employed platform engineering highlight its maturation into a practical and substantial model for next-generation software production. For avant-garde businesses, overlooking this transition may mean falling behind more agile competitors.

Adopting this shift hinges on recognizing that comprehensive commitment yields substantial rewards. Enterprises evolving their DevOps can draw lessons from notable success stories that showcase effective strategies, inspiration, and concrete proof of the benefits.

It’s evident that platform engineering is not merely advantageous; it’s an engine for sustaining a competitive edge.

Key takeaways

• A platform team must clearly articulate its mission, like enhancing workflow automation for engineering self-management, and define its role as a product team serving internal customer needs, not just as an on-call service.
• There is no universal blueprint for platform engineering; it should be tailored to each organization, beginning with dialogue and feedback from the engineering team to identify delays and frustrations
• While platform engineering reduces the need for complex scripting by DevOps professionals, it doesn’t eliminate the discipline but rather streamlines it, allowing for a leaner team focused on effective application delivery.

Interested in learning more about platform engineering? Read our real-life guide to platform engineering here.

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