DevOps has long brought technologies and people together while streamlining software development and delivery using automated CI/CD management and processes. Though DevOps accelerated time-to-market as development and operations teams converged, it also brought challenges. As organizations scaled, developers were often overwhelmed by the number of tools, infrastructure concerns, and increased cognitive load, eventually leading to slower innovation.
Platform Engineering emerged to focus on streamlining developer experiences and improving developer productivity. In this post, we’ll delve into the nuances of platform engineering versus DevOps, exploring their origins, methodologies, and how they address the evolving needs of modern software to improve your CI/CD pipeline.
What is Platform Engineering?
DevOps has significantly increased the agility of development and operations teams, giving operations teams the flexibility to work with networks, compute, and storage while also providing build, test, and deploy services to developers. This autonomy, however, burdened the developers – in many organizations, this evolved into requiring developers to resolve infrastructure and tooling concerns rather than building products.
Thus, internal developer platforms, and the platform engineering teams owning them were born. By investing in platforms, organizations can:
- Reduce the cognitive load on developers and accelerate product development.
- Dedicate experts to configure and manage the platform and associated offerings.
- Operate more efficiently due to reusable components and shared services.
- Accelerate new developer onboarding.
According to Martin Fowler and Evan Bottcher, “A digital platform is a foundation of self-service APIs, tools, services, knowledge, and support arranged as a compelling internal product. Autonomous delivery teams can use the platform to deliver product features faster, with reduced coordination.” The needs of stakeholders and users should determine the specific set of capabilities and scenarios supported by a platform; it’s unlikely that the internal developer platform for two different organizations will look exactly the same.
What is DevOps?
DevOps, a blend of “Development” and “Operations,” encompasses practices that bridge the gap between software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). By fostering collaboration among multiple teams throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC) and often automating the CI/CD process, DevOps streamlines workflows to accelerate delivery. The ultimate goal is to shorten the SDLC, ensuring continuous delivery of high-quality software while maintaining alignment between all involved teams.
Since its introduction in 2009, the term “DevOps” has rapidly evolved, taking on various definitions depending on the context in which it’s applied. This has led to some ambiguity, as DevOps encompasses both cultural practices—like team collaboration—and technical processes, such as CI/CD automation. The term’s flexibility makes it challenging to establish a single, universally accepted definition, as organizations and industries implement DevOps in diverse ways.
Importance of Understanding Differences Between the Two
DevOps and platform engineering share key attributes, such as promoting collaboration, modernizing software delivery, and leveraging automation. While DevOps predates platform engineering, the two disciplines are distinct in focus, contributors, and business outcomes, despite some areas of overlap. In many organizations, DevOps teams manage internal developer platforms (IDPs); however, calling this work “platform engineering” isn’t entirely accurate.
Here are some key distinctions:
| Aspect | DevOps | Platform Engineering |
|---|---|---|
| Stakeholder teams | Developers, Delivery, and IT Operations or Site Reliability Engineering (SREs) | All internal engineering teams, especially developers who rely on self-service to tooling and infrastructure |
| Priorities | Focused on automated, streamlined delivery and operational processes to ensure faster, more frequent, and more reliable software delivery | Abstracts infrastructure complexity to reduce cognitive load on developers, and enable efficient application development and delivery |
| Outcomes |
|
|
Understanding these differences is crucial for organizations aiming to optimize their software development and delivery. Though DevOps and platform engineering often intersect, they are not interchangeable, and each plays a distinct role in achieving business objectives.
Platform Engineering and DevOps Core Concepts
To better understand Platform Engineering and DevOps, we need to examine their core and their associated components. While both approaches help streamline the software delivery process, each has a different way of doing it.
Definition and Scope of Platform Engineering
Platform Engineering refers to designing and developing an internal platform streamlining developer workflows and improving developer productivity. It ensures developers focus on building the core product without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.
When talking about platform engineering, you’ll come across the following terms and concepts:
- Self-Service: Developers can request tools and services independently without waiting for an ops team.
- Developer productivity: Enhances developer productivity by reducing operational overhead.
- Golden paths: Well-defined and repeatable paths that provide a standardized way to deploy resources.
Platforms provide a consistent experience for various capabilities, making it easier and more efficient for developers to deliver products and features faster.
Definition and Scope of DevOps
Conversely, DevOps brings both development and operations teams closer to enhancing collaboration, automating workflows, and accelerating software delivery. It focuses on shared responsibility, faster feedback, and continuous improvement.
The core concepts of DevOps are:
- Collaboration & Communication: DevOps bridges the gap between dev and ops teams by increasing collaboration through various tools and channels.
- Automated CI/CD Pipelines: These pipelines automate the build, test, and deploy cycle to streamline processes and allow teams to ship features faster.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): This concept allows you to manage and provision infrastructure using code and automation tools.
Based on these concepts, DevOps fosters a culture of collaboration between development and operations teams by using various automation tools to ensure faster software delivery.
Common, Key Objectives of Both Practices
As mentioned earlier, platform engineering and DevOps aim to automate and streamline the software delivery process. While they target different areas and aspects, they have a few commonalities.
- Agility: Both practices focus on speed and agility and enable faster and more flexible development and deployment processes.
- Standardization: Both offer standardized workflows through reusable components, tools, and processes, enhancing collaboration and reducing errors
- Automation: Both focus on automating repetitive tasks like building, testing, and deploying to reduce the scope of manual error and provide greater efficiency.
Platform Engineering and DevOps Skill Sets and Roles
While both DevOps and platform engineering share some common principles and concepts, each requires specific skills tailored to its role. Understanding these skills is crucial for building a solid team and also for having a better idea of one’s career trajectory.
Skills for Platform Engineers
Platform engineers work closely with developers and operations teams to understand their requirements and provide a platform to help them succeed. Below are a few skills that platform engineers must possess:
- Cloud platforms: Platform engineers must be proficient with various cloud platforms as the capabilities they build for the platform would interact with a cloud platform.
- Service orchestration: Platform engineers must have hands-on expertise in building and orchestration services to provision various components when requested by developers using the platform.
- Application Lifecycle Management (ALM): They should also understand application lifecycle management well to build reusable components and create golden paths for a faster delivery process.
- Container Orchestrators: Platform engineers must understand containers well and Kubernetes, the de facto container orchestrator, to ensure scalability.
Skills for DevOps
DevOps professionals mainly focus on automating software development processes and infrastructure provisioning and monitoring. Their goal is to streamline and automate the process of building, testing, deploying, and monitoring applications. Here are a few skills that every DevOps engineer must possess.
- CI/CD: Most of the work that DevOps engineers do is based on CI/CD pipelines; hence, they must be well-versed in the process and various CI/CD tools.
- Scripting: Many of the automation tasks within a CI/CD pipeline require writing custom scripts, and hence, DevOps engineers must be familiar with popular scripting languages.
- Infrastructure as Code: One crucial aspect of DevOps is the automated deployment and management of infrastructure through code. Hence, a DevOps professional must be proficient with IaC tools.
- Configuration management tools: DevOps engineers must understand how to use configuration management tools to configure applications and infrastructure easily.
Do read more about the essential infrastructure skills for DevOps.
Overlapping Skills and Responsibilities
Since platform engineering and DevOps share ideas and concepts, it’s natural that the skills required for both will overlap.
- Container orchestration: A hands-on understanding of Kubernetes is necessary to automate and manage containerized applications across different environments.
- Cloud platforms: Both DevOps engineers and platform engineers must have a good grasp of cloud platforms, their service offerings, deployment models, and management tools.
- Understanding of security best practices: Regardless of the role, both must understand the security posture and adhere to best practices to ensure compliance with industry standards.
Kubernetes is at the core of platform engineering and DevOps, whether optimizing developer workflows or ensuring smooth deployment processes.
For platform engineers, it provides the foundation for building platforms that abstract away complex configurations, allowing developers to deploy and manage applications with minimal operational overhead.
It enables continuous delivery and deployment pipelines for DevOps engineers. Its orchestration capabilities automate routine tasks like scaling and failover, enhancing system reliability and overall stability.
Summary: Platform Engineering vs DevOps
DevOps traditionally aimed to bring development and operations teams together using automation, collaboration, and tools like CI/CD, which focused on agile delivery. The power of Platform Engineering is providing developers with a self-service platform that abstracts most of the operational complexity, allowing developers to focus on building products.
From a technical standpoint, both tools rely heavily on automation, infrastructure such as code, and container orchestration, especially Kubernetes, which is critical for managing distributed services. Thus, platform engineering and DevOps are not mutually exclusive but rather complementary practices that drive the evolution of modern software development together.
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