Platform Engineering Is Not Replacing Devops

By Author: Industry Tech Outlook
Total Articles: 5
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While the DevOps approach has been around for quite a while, many times it is mistaken for what it is. The last few years we see the term Platform Engineering entering discussions, at times making conversations even more complex. Sometimes it is misunderstood or seen as a replacement of DevOps. This short article aims to explain the place Platform Engineering takes in (complex) modern software engineering systems and what problems it can solve.

Traditional

In the "traditional" software engineering approach the development team responsibility focus is limited for both process and stack. Teams focus on development of new functionality and the majority of the infrastructure/platform resources and their configuration is provisioned on behalf of the application team with a strong dependency on teams who provide these services.

The result is that development teams have limited freedom of choice and software delivery typically sees long lead-times due to dependencies and lack of flow, leading to low business agility.

DevOps

Using a DevOps approach, teams take end-to-end ownership, ideally covering ...
... the entire value stream. Teams now no longer just develop new features but also have the responsibility for operational activities, manage cloud spend, and provision the required infrastructure resources and their configuration themselves, where the "landing zones" are provided by a platform team.

Owning both end-to-end process and stack means development teams have freedom to choose and have reduced dependencies resulting in shorter lead-times. However, they need many more skills (security, infra, networking, operations) while team sizes remain unchanged which means that the cognitive load heavily increases and can result in a "cognitive overload". In addition, with a DevOps (Scrum, Agile) approach the number of delivery cycles a team goes through heavily increases which means that certain activities (e.g., security testing) have to happen more often and require a "shift-left" approach.

The result is that on team level we see these teams struggling with all these (overhead) activities which do not directly add business value (e.g., no new functionality is created when you are implementing observability for your Kubernetes cluster) but are very much needed to run applications effectively. With the pressure to deliver new features, teams have to balance speed and quality, potentially impacting reliability.

On company scale, we see that innovation and (cloud)platform adoption is stalling, making it harder for organizations to deliver on their strategic priorities.

Read More: https://www.industry-techoutlook.com/cxo-viewpoint/platform-engineering-is-not-replacing-devops-nid-509.html

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