Platform Engineering Intro
Let's explore Platform Engineering in less than 5 minutes.
What is Platform Engineering?
Platform Engineering is a term used to describe the work performed by teams composed of infrastructure, software engineering, and devops engineers engaged in building enterprise platforms for developer enablement.
Ok...What's a platform? A platform is a grouping of software and infrastructure technologies arranged to provide a holistic developer experience. The purpose of this platform is to enable developers to ship better code, faster. Code produced through the platform will inherently comply with organizational standards when constrained by the platform technologies. If a platform was thought of as a construction project, the platform would provide the toolbox, the blueprint, the materials, the safeguards, the supply chain, and the delivery.
Still too vague? Let's break it down further by exploring how professionals divide their platforms. It is important to note that platform engineering is an evolving field, and as such, there are differing views on how a platform should be divided. We'll find PlatformEngineering.org's separation contains fewer planes than Microsoft MVP Steve Buchanan's view, however all of the technologies and the capabilities they provide are present in both models. Although the latter model of a platform contains 2 additional planes, they can be explained as abstractions of planes found in the former model. The Management Plane is simply contained within the Resource Plane in the PlatformEngineering.org model. Likewise, Buchanan's State Plane is split between Platform Engineering's Resource Plane and Integration & Delivery Plane.
PlatformEngineering.Org
- Resource Plane
- Integration & Delivery Plane
- Developer (Control) Plane
- Monitoring & Logging Plane
- Security Plane