DevOps vs. Platform Engineering

• DevOps is a software development approach that promotes collaboration between development and operations teams
• Platform engineering gives DevOps teams a centralized platform for their tools and workflows.

Platform engineering teams take over the design, implementation and maintenance of these tools and workflows. The platform team uses tool experts to understand developer needs, select the best tools for the required tasks, perform integrations and automations, and troubleshoot and maintain the established platform over time.

Benefits of Platform Engineering

• Improve developer experience: Platform engineering can enhance the experience a developer has with their software build and release systems. A better developer experience can do loads to improve morale and create a more productive engineering atmosphere.
• Standardize DevOps practices: By bringing together common DevOps approaches into a shared platform, organizations can begin to standardize with reusable build processes and automated infrastructure. This can unite an organization on common runtimes, observability methods and deployment processes. This can streamline the introduction of DevOps practices to an organization.
• Secure the DevOps pipeline: Various vulnerabilities exist within tooling that comprises modern CI/CD chains and cloud-native open source software. By outsourcing DevOps responsibility to a shared platform team, the organization can coalesce around more secure practices and avoid overlooking important updates or holes.
• Supply additional guardrails: Platform teams might also assist in the acquisition of new tools as well as outlining and enforcing policies for software infrastructure. While this may come at the cost of customization, additional guardrails can help avoid shadow IT and governance around internal development. Letting platform teams handle it could make maintenance easier across an organization.

What is an internal developer platform?

An internal developer platform is focused on a company’s internal development practices. You define a set of recommended and supported development paths to production and incrementally “pave” a way through them with an internal platform

an internal developer platform helps you centralize and scale specialized knowledge across the entirety of your development and operations lifecycle by reducing or eliminating cognitive load and manual steps.

Graphic of platform engineering concepts with implementation options.

Sources and Further Reading

• What is platform engineering? | Microsoft Learn
• DevOps Evolution and the Rise of Platform Engineering - Civo.com
• What’s the Difference Between DevOps and Platform Engineering? - DevOps.com
• Platform engineering vs. DevOps: What’s the difference? | TechTarget
• What is a developer self-service platform and why does it matter? | CNCF
• Platform Engineering Is Not Just about the Tools - The New Stack
• Platform as a Product in 4 Steps - The New Stack
• A Shortcut to Building an Enterprise-Grade Platform - The New Stack
• Platform Engineering Dies in 4 Weeks - The New Stack
• Internal Developer Platform vs. Internal Developer Portal: What’s Up? - The New Stack
• Platform Engineering: What Does ‘Good’ Look Like? - The New Stack
• Platform Teams: Start Small to Win Big - The New Stack
• IDP vs. Self-Service Portal: A Platform Engineering Showdown - The New Stack
• Platform Engineering Is for Everyone - The New Stack
• Internal Developer Platforms: The Heart of Platform Engineering - The New Stack
• Platform Engineering Can Help Your Security Team, Too - The New Stack
• What Devs Really Want in an Internal Developer Portal - The New Stack
• How to fail at platform engineering | CNCF

Build a Developer Platform

• How to Build an Internal Developer Platform: Everything You Need to Know (qovery.com)

• Build vs. Buy: The Platform Engineer’s Guide - The New Stack

• Is Your Internal Developer Platform Missing Orchestration? - The New Stack

  Over his last 20 years in technology, Bryant has uncovered three different patterns that go into building a platform, each with a different aim:

  • Top-down platform: Focused on the application developer, usually delivered in the form of an internal developer portal, most commonly built with Backstage. -Middle-out platform: Focused on platform engineering, including everything-as-a-service, process automation, managing things at scale and Platform as a Product. -Bottom-up platform: Focused on operations or infrastructure, like Terraform, Kubernetes, Apache Mesos or Crossplane, and the DevOps principle of “You build it, you run it.”

Platform Engineering

• How to Become a Platform Engineer - The New Stack
• [How to fail at platform engineering | CNCF](https://www.cncf.io/blog/2024/03/08/how-to-fail-at-platform-engineering/

Golden Path

Decoding golden paths: The highway for your developers (platformengineering.org)

Golden or paved paths are predefined routes in a platform that outline the best practices, steps, and required tools to achieve a specific goal. They are well-structured pathways that guide developers through building, deploying, and testing applications.

To understand this better, think of the process of building and deploying a web application. A golden path for this use case involves a development environment for building with node.js, configuring docker containers and Git for version control, setting up Jenkins for CI/CD, Kubernetes for container orchestration, and MongoDB for data. All this, including building, testing, and deployment, is automated.

Technical insights

How to build an IDP with Backstage, Crossplane and Argo CD • Viktor Farcic • PlatformCon 2022