Novel engineering challenges have been introduced owing to the rise of microservices, container orchestration & the likes. Platform engineering teams are being formed at several enterprises for shouldering these responsibilities. In some aspects, the role of a platform engineer has not drastically transformed when compared to that of other roles related to DevOps.

Platform engineers help the application developers for using software into the hands of the end users in a better and easier way. This kind of broad stroke manifests itself in several ways such as standardizing the Kubernetes deployments of an enterprise, preparing documentations for application developers, making sure that infrastructure is auditable, and automating several deployment tasks.

The DevOps responsibilities are different from that of a platform engineering team. Although, they are a little similar in a few aspects they differ in others. Hence finding out where exactly platform engineering & DevOps differ or diverge will facilitate in explaining the growing popularity of this new team.

For instance, coordination among team as well as a DevOps team is necessary if a team within an organization needs to host a new website. Contrast it with the platform engineering notion. Platform engineers develop systems which helps the teams to build on. And when the same team owned a platform which could handle hosting the website, there would no need of any coordination among this team & the platform engineering team.

Roles & responsibilities of Platform engineering team

A huge difference is the role played by an API boundary, & how explicit this boundary is, when it comes within the context of each role’s responsibilities. This is relevant to the suggestion that DevOps is more ad hoc when compared to platform engineering. Both the platform engineering as well as DevOps teams are concerned with service accounts, infrastructure & deployments. But DevOps teams are not developing platforms which provide explicit APIs & abstractions which render explicit APIs & abstractions which provide flexibility for application developers, platform teams are developing these types of platforms.

Let us look at an example, if we have to describe the role played by platform engineering in an enterprise. For instance, an insurance firm that was established in the 1980s has begun to shift its infrastructure to the cloud. Now, let us say that within this organization, if the software engineers are split into 2 categories such as application development and infrastructure development, before the cloud era, it was very common for the infrastructure engineers to resemble a backend team that provided Application Programming Interfaces.

These responsibilities are most often fulfilled by leveraging IaC. A few common infrastructures as code tools include Puppet, Terraform, & AWS CloudFormation. Most of these are actually open source and they are generally, the platform that is built by platform engineers composing these open-source tools. An enterprise’s platform engineers customize IaC tools to the requirements of the enterprise’s application developers.

When does any enterprise require a platform engineering team?

There are tradeoffs enterprises that most often look at when considering developing a platform engineering team. While building a platform engineering team would lead to build tooling & infrastructure which surges engineering productivity, it is likely that a few engineers have taken it upon themselves to assume a platform engineer-like role, without a platform team in place. Organizationally, this can lead to a bigger challenge & become a huge burden on all engineers in a company. Hence, without a definitive set of engineers who are responsible for a company’s platform, engineers working in a platform engineering capacity will not be effective mostly. In other words, developing a platform engineering team can be thought of as weighing short-term gains against long-term gains.

Developing a platform engineering team is actually easier said than done. Platform engineering at a startup that was established in the cloud era appears really different when compared to the platform engineering at a pre-cloud era organization. Other than startups that were established in the cloud era, several pre-cloud era organizations have on-prem systems which are yet to be migrated to cloud. Furthermore, while migrating to the cloud was already a huge challenge, pre-cloud era organizations possess to have several red tape as well as bureaucracy standing in the way of enterprise changes. The short-term downsides for building a platform engineering team may be made large by these types of enterprise barriers.

In a nutshell

Enterprises have to consider the short-term losses which building a platform engineering team would cause. However, the observation of several product teams developing similar features or trying to accomplish similar processes is one of the strong indications which any enterprise that a platform engineering team would be benefit from. When a platform team is formed product teams can experience a surge in productivity and the reason why platform engineering is interesting is since it can increase the efficiency of an entire organization completely and this has to be taken into consideration prior to writing off the requirements for a platform engineering team.