Platform Engineering Is A Big Investment; You Need To Make Sure If You Really Need It
- Jonas Bonér.
- CEO/CTO, Lightbend.
- 12 April 2023,
- 18 minute watch
In this episode of TFiR: T3M, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Jonas Bonér, Founder and CEO at Lightbend, to share his insights on the current trends in the market, particularly in the DevOps and platform engineering space.
Define platform engineering.
It is a new term that addresses old problems. It addresses the complexity of the cloud-native infrastructure and optimizes developer productivity. It allocates a dedicated team to build out an internal platform, manage the infrastructure, build tool chains or workflows, provide self-service for internal development teams, make decisions on product integrations, etc.
DevOps vs. Platform Engineering
DevOps is mostly useful as a way to optimize the development process, getting rigor into it, optimizing the application in terms of performance, availability, and scale, and ensuring that it executes optimally. Platform engineering is about optimizing the developer experience.
Is DevOps dead?
The internal development teams that provide platform engineering use DevOps practices, so it’s not dead.
What’s ahead:
More vendors will provide NoOps solutions to developers to deliver just the right set of abstractions.
Advice for companies looking to embrace platform engineering:
- Understand if you really need platform engineering. While it can maximize the value long term, it’s not something that should be taken lightly. It is a big investment.
- Manage your costs, but still manage to deliver features for your customers and deliver them fast. Speed is a competitive advantage.
- Start with simplifying, abstracting, and automating as much as possible.
- Provide solutions and developer platforms that help developers to focus on the code, either through a developer survey or some sort of internal developer platform.
- Engineers like to take control of the nitty-gritty details. With this structure, you need to have faith and delegate so that it will free you up to focus on the stuff that really matters.
