Platform Engineering - an emerging technology approach augments the delivery of applications as well the pace at which they produce business value. This technology enhances the developer experience as well as the productivity by rendering self-service capabilities with automated infrastructure operations. The reason this emerging technology is trending is due to its promise to optimize the developer experience & augment the product teams’ delivery of customer value.

Gartner predicts that by 2026, eighty percent of software engineering firms will establish platform teams as internal providers of components, tools & reusable services for application delivery. Platform engineering will solve the main issue of cooperation between software developers & the  operators.

“Platform engineering emerged in response to the increasing complexity of modern software architectures. Today, non-expert end users are often asked to operate an assembly of complicated arcane services,” says Paul Delory, VP Analyst at Gartner. “To help end users, and reduce friction for the valuable work they do, forward-thinking companies have begun to build operating platforms that sit between the end user and the backing services on which they rely.”

Modernizing enterprise software delivery, specifically for digital transformation

While Platform engineering is mainly intended to modernize enterprise software delivery, specifically for digital transformation, the engineering platform is developed & maintained by a dedicated product team, that is mainly designed for supporting the requirements of software developers as well as others by rendering common, reusable tools & capabilities & interfacing to complex infrastructure.

Although the specific capabilities of an engineering platform is completely based on the requirements of its end users, the platform is a product, that is developed by a dedicated team of experts & rendered to clients, who may either be developers, data scientists or even the end users. Platform teams should try to understand the requirements of their user groups first, and then prioritize the work & then later build a platform which is useful to target audience.

Increasing developer productivity & reducing the cognitive load

While the aim is a frictionless, and self-service developer experience that renders the right capabilities to enable developers as well as others to build valuable software with as little overhead as possible, the platform should enhance developer productivity with decreasing the cognitive load and it should comprise everything the development teams require & present it in whatever manner that fits best with the team’s preferred workflow.

As the development of a new generation of tools has made platform engineering a hot topic of conversation within the DevOps community, these tools look at developing & maintaining platforms easier.

What an ideal development platform is for one firm would completely be useless to another. Also, even within the same enterprise, several and diverse development teams would have entirely different requirements. While the aim of the engineering platform is enhancing the developer productivity, for the enterprise, it renders consistency & efficiency. Again for the developer, it provides a welcome relief from the management of delivery pipelines as well as low-level infrastructure.

Benefits of Platform engineering

Today, Software engineering teams are being challenged to enhance the developer agility, decrease cognitive load & ultimately develop better products even more efficiently. The benefits of taking a Platform Engineering approach to achieve these objectives include the following:

Self-service agility

Platforms improve developer experience by offering a curated and optimised set of tools, services and processes which developers don’t have to sort through and build themselves. But they also provide balance by allowing developers to choose which tools best suit their needs from a self-service catalogue.

This self-service approach assists the users in discovering, operating, securing, enhancing & building upon complex Information Technology systems, however it also offers them with a degree of flexibility & autonomy to make the correct choices for their products.

Consistent governance

Platform engineering can decrease the risks from shadow IT, enhance security as well as lower the total cost of ownership for your technology estates & therefore, this efficiency should also contribute for making your technology estates even more sustainable too. Furthermore, in the process of making tools as well as processes discoverable, the platform engineering teams can identify & decrease redundant tools & processes and make sure that those which are in use are kept up to date & continuously assess their usefulness as technology & their platforms, evolve.

In a nutshell

Platform engineering implements reusable tools & self-service capabilities with automated infrastructure operations, and this helps in enhancing the developer experience as well as productivity. This technology approach utilizes reusable configurable application components as well as services.