Who is a Platform Engineer

A trendy new buzzword or a useful offspring of DevOps?

In the world of software development, the concept of DevOps has proven so successful that even talking about it as a practice sounds old-fashioned. But although it may be time to declare the old idea of DevOps dead, that says less about its decline than about its success.

Ten years ago, DevOps was a cultural phenomenon, when developers and operations specialists came together and formed a collaborative alliance to overcome the divide. Fast-forwarding to today, we see that DevOps has become even more formalized with the emergence of platform engineering. Within platform engineering, DevOps now has a budget, a team, and a set of self-service tools so that developers can manage operations more directly.

A platform engineering team delivers benefits that make it possible to use Kubernetes as a self-service tool, increasing development efficiency and speed for hundreds of users. This is yet another sign of the maturity and ubiquity of Kubernetes. According to Gartner, within the next three years four out of five software development organizations will use platform teams to provide reusable services and tools for application delivery.

Platform Engineering as a New Layer

As the number of developers has grown from hundreds to thousands and applications have proliferated, the old concept of middleware is now occupied by platform engineering with a self-service model for developers.

As a replacement for IT, the platform engineering team relies on two sets of technologies — cloud-native technologies and modern databases and data services such as Postgres, Redis, Cassandra, Kafka, as well as data streaming services such as Spark, all offered by the platform team to developers.

The core services offered by platform engineers, which previously required ever more Kubernetes knowledge from users, include the Kubernetes distribution itself, whether that is OpenShift, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), or Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).

Another service is working with data on Kubernetes — managing storage resources, backups, disaster recovery, as well as databases and data services running under Kubernetes.

Making Kubernetes Invisible — Focusing on the "What" Instead of the "How"

When a technology becomes ubiquitous, it begins to become more invisible. Think, for example, of semiconductors. They are everywhere. They have advanced from micrometers to nanometers, from five nanometers to three. We use them in our remote controls, phones, and cars, but the chips are invisible, and as end users we simply do not think about them.

The same thing is happening with Kubernetes. In the enterprise, Kubernetes is being embedded into more and more systems, and the self-service paradigm makes it invisible to users. Previously, with DevOps, every developer needed to know Kubernetes. Now developers need to use it, but only the platform engineer really needs to know it.

A platform engineer gives developers a wonderful gift: they no longer have to strain to see and understand Kubernetes at a low level as part of their daily work. As Kubernetes continues to thrive, it helps reduce the persistent skills shortage and makes a substantial contribution to a company's ability to innovate and maintain a competitive advantage.