Introduction
On a whim, I entered the phrase "DevOps is dead" into google and the result was rather interesting.
As I've never heard about platform engineering before, I continued and searched for "platform engineering":
The second search result is from Gartner, a fact I find rather 'noteworthy' so to speak1
But what is Platform Engineering exactly?
Understanding platform Engineering
I'm going to explain the concept by their own words:
Platform engineering is the future of software delivery. While “you build it, you run it” DevOps helped some software teams boost productivity and efficiency, it was extremely painful for everyone else. The growing complexity of cloud-native technologies and architectures, paired with the expectation for developers to be responsible for it all, was a crippling combination.
So what is the solution?
build an Internal Developer Platform as “a foundation of self-service APIs, tools, services, knowledge, and support [by Platform Engineers] which are arranged as a compelling internal product.2”
As I understand this, it sounds to me that they advocate building your own internal Heroku.
My thinking is that if an organisation is struggling with their DevOps organisation, they are not in a spot to build such an 'Internal Developer Platform'. And that seems exactly the point.
From what I can tell, the concept of Platform Engineering has two goals:
- To sell a PaaS product to organisations struggling with DevOps
- To sell consultancy to help organisations migrating to the PaaS
Although I have no qualms about companies using a new concept to sell products and services, I feel like sooner or later, everything old is new again.
