By CIOReview | Friday, November 8, 2024

Platform engineering is something that all organizations with DevOps teams should consider. Consolidating essential operations procedures into an IDP significantly decreases the inherent cognitive strain on DevOps practitioners. Turning standard DevOps procedures into self-service APIs decreases project lead time, allowing developers to quickly deliver meaningful business value.

Fremont, CA: Platform engineering is a natural extension of a mature DevOps methodology. It aims to supplement existing DevOps concepts while reducing cognitive strain. The overarching goal is to introduce self-service to DevOps. Platform engineers simplify everyday DevOps operations by creating an internal development platform (IDP) with consistent tools for developing and deploying apps.

Platform engineers create IDPs to tackle everyday DevOps tasks, decreasing or eliminating overheads. This enables DevOps to focus more quickly on tasks that generate real company value.

Automate DevOps Tasks

The primary purpose of IDPs is to create a standardized and reusable solution for all teams. IDP products and services already provide features for setting up a repository, assigning the appropriate team members, running an environment, and defining a deployment pipeline. These are classified into four major management areas: infrastructure, installation, configuration, and user access control.

Whether you use an off-the-shelf IDP or create your own, most IDPs include a user interface for developers (others are command-line only). Typically, an API layer demands that multiple services perform an automated activity. This action could be to create a git repository, start a database with a terraform script, or perform another everyday DevOps job. Developers then automatically use the IDP to set up a new project's key components.

Abstracting away the lower-level mechanics of carrying out these activities prevents developers from differing in their approach. Infrastructure is set up and delivered in a standardized manner, making maintenance easier.

Support Developer Autonomy      

IDPs also encourage developer autonomy via self-service technologies. This avoids long lead periods in deploying project resources caused by developing and building the infrastructure from scratch. Developers can now leverage the IDP to automate their job. IDPs also eliminate the need to open backlog tickets for new environments and wait for them to be prioritized and completed. Instead, developers can carry out these actions through the IDP interface.

Enforce Security by Design

Finally, IDPs may be secure and compliant from the outset. This means that platform engineers incorporate security and compliance capabilities into IDP services, ensuring that infrastructure is installed according to security best practices. They can also guarantee that Git pipelines are set up to automatically check code for vulnerabilities before it is generated and deployed.

Platform teams transform DevOps pipelines into powerful DevSecOps pipelines by integrating secure and compliant processes into development workflows. This technique ensures that security is essential to the software development lifecycle. This technique benefits enterprises by decreasing both the workload for developers and the risk of data breaches.