Platform Engineering Isn’t Just DevOps Renamed

Tech Field Day Podcast

Platform engineering has been happening for a long time, but today’s implication is quite different. This episode of the On-Premise IT podcast brings platform engineering expert Michael Levan, industry analyst Steven Dickens, and host Stephen Foskett to consider what platform engineering is today. Building a platform for self service in the cloud has more in common with product development than the platforms delivered historically by IT infrastructure teams. One of the drivers for the DevOps trend was the divergence of IT development and operations over the last few decades, but this was different in the mainframe world. In many ways, today’s platform engineering teams are more mature process-wise thanks to the demands of multi-tenant cloud applications.
Inside IT’s Hottest Technology Trend, Platform Engineering
The term “platform engineering” has exploded in IT. Explainers and articles are rife about platform engineering’s boundless implications. Some are defining it as a niche battle, others are calling it the DevOps killer, and some are projecting it as a million-dollar career. Whatever it is, findings show that it is at the peak of the hype cycle, and is settling into a new standard.
In this episode of On-Premise IT podcast, host Stephen Foskett and guests, Steven Dickens, VP and Practice Leader at The Futurum Group, and Michael Levan, Kubernetes and Platform Engineering Specialist, lift the blinds obscuring this new sensation.
Marketing Fluff or an Emerging Trend?
The answer lies somewhere in the middle. The proclivity to slap new labels on old things is not new in marketing. The hype about platform engineering is somewhat the same. “We’ve been doing platform engineering for a really long time. It just has a name and a focus point now, but it’s not something that just popped out of nowhere,” says Levan.
Dickens likens it to the role of Mainframe developers. “The Mainframe guys speak in different tongues and worship different gods than the distributed and cloud guys, but if you took away the nomenclatures and actually looked at the job, it would be the same functional work.”
What’s the Hype about?
So why it being loved to death now? Because platform engineering does what software delivery processes benefit from most. It drives standardization and automation.
In a way, platform engineering is like the Hibachi experience. At a traditional Hibachi-style Japanese place, diners select their choice of noodles, meat, broth, sauce and toppings from the counter. At the bar, the chefs wield their knives, chopping, grilling, and cooking the ingredients into a hearty bowl of goodness.
Platform engineers do the same thing for the development environment. Platform engineering is the methodology to bring disparate components together into a platform in a way that makes sense, ultimately elevating the developer’s experience. In doing so, it alleviates the challenge of having to constantly worry about the platform.
The modern stack that engineers interface with can be broadly divided into three categories – the platform, the capabilities and the UI.