Platform Engineering and Industry Trends

Now that people have realized the importance of microservices, IaaS, and PaaS, the need for DevOps and SRE roles have just skyrocketed in the IT industries. But as this was happening, a new term called Platform Engineers completely changed how the companies were operating the software development lifecycle.

DevOps, Site Reliability Engineers, and Platform engineers are almost identical but with minor differences. DevOps can be called more of an ideology, and SRE and PE its approaches to complete the DevOps objectives.

Before discussing and arguing what DevOps, SRE, and PE are, let's first understand what software development is. A software developer is someone who writes code to create a program by using a programming language. After testing the developed code, it is passed to either of the departments mentioned above to continue the Software development lifecycle.

In this article, we will first learn what DevOps, SRE, and Platform engineering are and then point out the differences between these three domains. There needs to be more clarity among the IT job aspirants regarding the domains mentioned earlier.

What Is DevOps and Why It Is Popular?

DevOps is an approach wherein the engineers perform a few developer tasks and some operations. The name "Dev-Ops" provides basic information about what it is, i.e., an engineer who manages deployment-related operations. A DevOps engineer's most important practice is making the SDLC faster and providing continuous integration and delivery with end-to-end automation.

Sometimes, DevOps engineers are also responsible for maintaining an application on the cloud servers and monitoring them with various tools such as Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog, Azure Monitor and many more.

DevOps has recently gained popularity because many companies have changed how they deploy applications. Still, now that everyone has accepted "Cloud Computing" as the future, they have changed the SDLC process by removing the operations team and making it a hybrid of Developers and operations, i.e., Dev-Ops.

What is Site Reliability Engineering

Site reliability engineers, or SRE, follow the DevOps principles to achieve their objectives. The site reliability engineers are responsible for maintaining the application over the World Wide Web. They also ensure the applications are active and healthy by checking all the server metrics and logs. They constantly check and maintain the system requirements needed to run an application.

The value and demand of site reliability engineers in the IT industries have shot up since many companies now use Cloud-based services, such as AWS and Microsoft Azure, rather than building their own infrastructure.

SRE also focuses on lowering site failures by analyzing the web traffic and upgrading or downgrading the server's resources. Also, they play a vital role in cost optimization for a company by utilizing only those needed resources.

SRE also focuses on automating manual tasks that take time to complete. They use various third-party tools and applications to achieve this objective. Because of this, building a new environment for a project and carrying out critical deployments is more accessible and less time-consuming.

Just like DevOps, the primary objective of SRE is to reduce the SDLC time and keep the applications alive without downtime.

Platform Engineering: A New Approach to Maintain CI/CD and To Create Infrastructure

The concept of Platform Engineering is newer when compared to DevOps and SRE. When the world was adjusting to the practices of DevOps and SRE, platform engineering emerged all of a sudden. Since Platform engineer is a new term as of 2022, its roles and responsibilities are yet to be clearly defined and accepted by the IT industries.

There are many similarities between DevOps, SRE, and PE. One thing is for sure, no matter what domain you are working on, you have to make the operations part of the SDLC easier between the developers and product management team. Also, applications should be deployed with less time and should be accessible without downtime.

Platform engineers create the platform, i.e., infrastructure for code deployment with the help of cloud services such as AWS, Azure, and Google cloud. They write automation scripts on Terraform, CloudFormation, Azure ARM, etc. Platform engineers can create infrastructure over the Cloud websites with these scripts for application deployment. In simpler words, the PE provides an infrastructure on top of which applications run that are created by software developers.

Now that we understand DevOps, SRE, and Platform engineering, let's understand how different these roles are from one another.

Below I have mentioned a few points that distinguish PE from DevOps and SRE.

How Is Platform Engineering Different From DevOps and SRE

Although there are many similarities between all three domains, there are some differences. My personal industry experience tells me that DevOps engineers are more suited to a startup environment rather than SRE and platform engineers, as they can not only code but also manage various clouds and their services.

On the other hand, Platform engineers and SRE perform more specialized tasks in companies with big employee sizes.

1. DevOps and Site reliability engineers focus more on maintaining the application on the internet by monitoring metrics and logs. On the other hand, Platform engineers are more inclined to support software delivery operations such as continuous integration and deployment.
2. Platform Engineers use third-party tools that assist them in maintaining a good flow of CI/CD throughout the software development lifecycle. In contrast, Site reliability engineers use tools that gather metrics of the servers so that monitoring is easy and the server is up for a maximum time. SRE also helps to reduce the cost of servers by adequately analyzing the server load and balancing them by changing their state from time to time.
3. DevOps and SRE focus on ensuring that all the system requirements are met and that there is proper server configuration concerning the front-end and back-end applications. In contrast, Platform engineers construct the pipelines for the SDLC through various version control managers such as Git, GitHub and Bitbucket.
4. All three of these domains use various tools to meet their objectives and reduce the toil, or in layperson's terms, reduce manual operations.
5. Platform Engineers can create a platform with specific APIs that assist front-end and back-end developers, making their work easier. On the contrary, DevOps and site reliability engineers cannot do this.
6. It has been found that platform engineers require more programming skills like python and GO to create APIs compared to the DevOps and SRE roles.
7. While site reliability engineers monitor the applications, the platform engineers provide faster delivery of applications through automation and CI/CD with tools and services such as Azure DevOps, Jenkins, CodePipeline, etc.
8. Platform engineers are more product-oriented and may have to communicate with the product management team more often when compared to the SRE and DevOps.

Future of Platform Engineering and Possible Trends

Currently, platform engineering is evolving with many new changes and practices. In the future, we may see a new version of platform engineers that manage differently and collaborate with multiple teams.

We may see some workflow variations that include more architectural discussions, developer productivity ideas, and optimizing internal workflows. Also, having strong communications with the developer team and the product management and UI/UX team is a good option. At the same time, focusing more on automation can be a central topic for the Platform Engineering team.

Conclusion

The above article taught us about the work and daily activities of DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering. We also distinguished how these three domains are different from each other and how they work to achieve different objectives.

Platform engineering is a new term, and its roles and responsibilities still need to be clearly stated and universally yet to be accepted; until then, companies will try to create their version of Platform engineers.

Even after all this, there is a bright future for platform engineers in multinational companies with significant employee sizes when compared to early startups. We also discussed the possible trends in platform engineering in the recent future.

I hope that you were able to understand the important differences between DevOps, SRE and Platform Engineering.

Thank you for reading the article.

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