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Platform Engineering (PE) is increasingly seen as an enabler for rapid application development. Gartner has named Platform Engineering as one of the technology trends for 2024. What is Platform engineering? What are the benefits? Why is it important for enterprises to invest in Platform Engineering?
What is Platform Engineering?
Platform Engineering is centered around the concept of enabling the development team to focus on delivering business value. By ‘the team,’ the complete team involved in building, deploying, and operating an IT system is meant.
PE is a holistic approach to software development that focuses on delivering business value and optimizing efficiency and effectiveness. It also supports the application lifecycle and cultivates a culture of continuous improvement. While tools play a crucial role, true PE requires a combination of tools, processes, behaviors, and culture to be successful.
What are the benefits?
If properly implemented, Platform Engineering makes product teams efficient and effective in building, deploying, and managing IT systems.
So, PE focuses on automating infrastructure provisioning, simplifying operations, and providing a set of tools and services that support the application lifecycle.
As mentioned PE is not only about a tool but also about processes, behaviors, and culture. A tool is just a tool. The benefits for IT teams are enormous. To name a few:
- Improved Productivity: Platform engineering simplifies the complexities of infrastructure management, freeing up the development team to concentrate on delivering business value. By offering standardized development environments, Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, and automated testing tools, the time and effort required to move from development to deployment can be significantly reduced. This efficiency allows teams to iterate quickly, respond to market demands faster, and ultimately deliver more value to customers.
- Scalability and Reliability: Platform engineering prioritizes practices and tools that ensure IT systems are scalable, resilient, and fault-tolerant. By adopting scalable architectures, implementing redundant systems, and incorporating fault-tolerant design patterns, the team can build applications that perform reliably under varying loads and gracefully recover from failures. This enhances the user experience, minimizes downtime, and brings confidence in the stability of the system.
- Best Practices & Standardization: The platform engineering approach integrates industry standards for security, performance, and reliability into the development process. By adhering to established best practices and leveraging standardized tools and frameworks, the team benefits from a consistent and predictable approach to system development and deployment. This reduces the learning curve for new team members, facilitates collaboration, and minimizes the risk of errors or security vulnerabilities.
- Innovation & Experimentation: By abstracting away the complexities of infrastructure management and providing standardized development environments, platform engineering empowers teams to focus on innovation and experimentation. Freed from the burden of mundane tasks, such as server provisioning or software configuration, developers can dedicate more time and energy to exploring new features, experimenting with advanced algorithms, or testing architectures. This creates a culture of innovation within the organization, driving continuous improvement and enabling the creation of more competitive and compelling applications.
Conclusion
Platform Engineering serves as a crucial accelerator for enterprises, particularly in today’s fast-paced digital landscape. Platform engineering not only enhances productivity, scalability, reliability, and standardization but also encourages a culture of innovation and experimentation, ultimately leading to the delivery of higher-quality, more impactful software solutions. It enables rapid application development and is increasingly recognized as a key enabler for business growth.
