Platform Engineering designs, automates, and maintains scalable, reliable, secure, cost-effective, and compliant software infrastructure.
Platform engineering is an emerging discipline in software development that emphasizes building and maintaining consistent, compliant, scalable, cost-effective, and largely self-service infrastructure platforms to support the needs of software developers. Platform engineering principles often get applied as an Internal Developer Platform (IDP), which helps software developers get up and running faster with guides and documentation, and a service catalog, which provides pre-approved services developers can easily choose from. Platform engineering teams commonly take a "Platform as a Product" approach to serving the needs of software developers by applying product management principles to the platform's development and management.
Container visualization tools in platform engineering provide a graphical depiction of the cluster (e.g., Kubernetes cluster) and its resources. These tools help platform engineering teams gain insights into the cluster's health, resource allocation, and application deployments, making it easier to understand and manage the complex interactions within container environments. By visualizing the container environment, platform engineers can make informed decisions and effectively operate and maintain their platforms.
In platform engineering, a service catalog is essential for enhancing collaboration, promoting reuse, and streamlining the consumption of services and APIs. It offers a comprehensive, organized overview of platform services, enabling users to discover, understand, and utilize these services efficiently.
The concept of "Platform as a Product" focuses on considering the platform itself as a product, delivering value to its users. It involves applying product management principles to the platform's development and management. Adopting this mindset enables platform engineering teams to create platforms that provide value, drive innovation, and cultivate a thriving ecosystem. This approach ensures the platform aligns with user needs, is user-friendly, and evolves with changing needs and technological advances.
Platform orchestration is indispensable for maintaining scalability, reliability, and efficiency within complex platform architectures. It automates deployment and management tasks, diminishes manual labor, and ensures consistent operations across the platform. As a vital use case in platform engineering, platform orchestration manages and coordinates the deployment, scaling, and lifecycle of services and applications on the platform.
In the context of platform engineering, automation is pivotal for efficiently implementing the GitOps workflow. Integrating automation into the GitOps workflow allows organizations to achieve quicker, more reliable deployments, reduce human errors, ensure environment consistency, and enhance overall efficiency and scalability of their platform operations.
An internal developer portal, often referred to as an internal API portal or developer hub, acts as a central resource for developers within an organization. It provides a self-service environment for developers to discover and utilize internal APIs, tools, documentation, and resources for application and integration development. This portal centralizes knowledge and resources, encourages best practices, and nurtures a culture of innovation and continuous improvement.
Here is a comprehensive Platform Engineering requirements checklist you can use to further define your use case.
The platform should include automation for repetitive tasks such as build, test, deployment, and code reviews in the developer workflow.
The platform should support high scalability and performance, offering features like auto-scaling, load balancing, and efficient resource management.
Adheres to industry standards for data security and privacy, safeguarding sensitive information.
Essential security measures such as Multi-factor Authentication (MFA), Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and API Authorization should be supported.
It should provide capabilities to capture, track, and manage user feedback and bug reports effectively.
The platform should offer robust version control systems and API management features to maintain the code base and manage APIs effectively.
Integrates with leading CI/CD tools.
Integrates with leading IAM tools.
Integrates with leading infrastructure management tools.
The tool should offer an intuitive interface, good documentation, and rich features to enhance productivity and ease of use for developers.
The platform should offer comprehensive activity tracking and performance metrics, with detailed logging and monitoring capabilities.
The tool should offer customizable and detailed reports, enabling insights into application performance, user activity, and error analysis.
The platform should offer tools for easy and smooth deployment of applications, including Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and Configuration Management.
The tool must provide robust service orchestration features to automate and manage the workflow of complex processes.
Here are some of the more popular Platform Engineering products.
A low-code automation platform for infrastructure provisioning with built-in security measures.
A management platform for cost control, governance, and automation across multiple clouds.
Resourcely is a configuration engine that provides a self-service and easy way of deploying and testing guardrails for engineers.
An IaC automation platform for simplified cloud environment management.
An open source platform for unified, standardized management of backend services and tools.
An enterprise-grade platform for building standardized configurations and workflows.
An internal developer portal for building a service/software catalog and enabling self-service.
A management platform for the lifecycle management of Kubernetes clusters and apps.
An open source multi cloud platform for collaborative IaC originally developed by Hootsuite.
A cloud native control plane framework for orchestrating applications and infrastructure.
An internal developer platform for deploying self-service applications and infrastructure from reusable templates.
A platform for delivering a curated Kubernetes-native platform API across organizations.
Harness IDP streamlines software management, automates service onboarding, centralizes documentation, and integrates with plugins.
An IaC management platform for seamless cloud stack orchestration and automation.
VMware's suite for building, running, and managing modern, cloud native applications.
A cloud native app protection and observability platform for containers and Kubernetes.
A sustainable engineering platform for empowering people and boosting software delivery.
A Kubernetes-focused platform for faster development iterations.
A cloud orchestration platform for multi-cloud environments, enabling automation and DevOps integration.
An internal developer platform for simplifying cloud-native applications delivery.
Cortex is an Internal Developer Portal (IDP) designed to streamline and enhance the efficiency of engineering teams.
A subscription service for hardware provisioning and monitoring in hybrid cloud environments.
A multiservice platform for infrastructure automation, security, and multicloud networking.
An internal developer portal for accelerating velocity and achieving high standards.
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