FINAL WORD
Within the next three years , four out of five software engineering organisations will leverage platform teams to provide reusable services .
A decade ago , DevOps emerged as a cultural phenomenon , bringing developers and operations professionals together to break down silos . However , as extraordinary of a shift in IT this was , DevOps has quickly matured to the point where discussing it as a practice seems outdated . Regardless , the transition from the original concept of DevOps to its current state signifies its triumph rather than its demise .
In fact , from the ashes of DevOps rises the platform engineer , a new role specifically tailored for the modern era of DevOps . Under the umbrella of platform engineering , DevOps now operates with a dedicated budget , a team , and a suite of self-service tools that empower developers to directly manage operations .
The platform engineering team offers significant advantages , enabling developers to leverage Kubernetes as a self-service tool . This enhancement boosts the efficiency and speed of development for numerous users , signifying the maturity and ubiquity of Kubernetes . According to Gartner , within the next three years , four out of five software engineering organisations will leverage platform teams to provide reusable services and tools for application delivery .
Platform engineering serves as the new middleware in the software development landscape . As the number of developers and applications continues to soar , the traditional concept of middleware , an always-available app server , has been replaced by platform engineering ’ s selfservice model for developers .
This transition holds immense significance . During the earlier phases of DevOps , experimentation with various technologies was widespread , but these technologies had not yet converged . However , modern applications now operate seamlessly using containers and storage , with networking and security managed through Kubernetes in a cloud-native manner .
Developers no longer rely on ticketing systems . Instead , they expect elastic infrastructure that they can use and deploy through the platform , which is maintained and operated by the platform engineer .
The platform engineer ensures that the platform is self-service , highly available , reliable , elastic , is multi-tenant yet highly secure , has guard rails to prevent overextending the platform , provides usage monitoring and bill back methods , but the platform engineer themselves are not building the application or own the deployment of the applications .
They are enablers for speeding developer innovations and application deployment . This shift in maturity improves responsiveness , allowing developers to make swift changes to their applications and rapidly drive them into production . With developers taking charge , both development and deployment times have drastically decreased .
T-Mobile , for instance , reduced application deployment time from six months to just hours with the assistance of Portworx as an element of their platform architecture . Enterprises with thousands of developers require self-service or ondemand access to storage and data services , which platform engineering teams strive to deliver at scale .
As a progression from traditional IT , the platform engineering group relies on two key sets of technologies : cloud-native technologies and AI-ready data services : modern databases and data services like Postgres , Redis , Cassandra , Kafka , and Spark , and more recently analytics and AI tools like Snowflake and ChatGPT , all provided as services by the platform team to developers .
Platform engineers offer crucial services that eliminate the need for extensive Kubernetes expertise among users . These services include managing various Kubernetes distributions like OpenShift , GKE , EKS , or Rancher , as well as providing security measures through platforms like Prisma Cloud or Sysdig .
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