Was ist Platform Engineering? Der nächste Schritt nach DevOps

Platform Engineering represents the logical next step in the evolution of DevOps, addressing the challenges that arise as software development becomes increasingly complex. As the world of software development continues to move forward, many organizations face limitations with the traditional DevOps approach. Platform Engineering addresses these challenges by focusing on creating toolchains and workflows that provide self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations.

At its core, Platform Engineering is about designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service for developers. This is achieved through a dedicated platform team that creates an internal product line, known as the Internal Developer Platform (IDP). The IDP serves as the internal product for the organization's development teams, aiming to drastically reduce the cognitive load on developers.

Instead of expecting each developer to become an expert in areas such as Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and security, the platform provides a "golden path" for developers to quickly, securely, and consistently deploy their applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

Platform Engineering is not a replacement for DevOps but rather an evolution of the DevOps philosophy to a larger scale. DevOps emphasized the mantra "You build it, you run it," giving development teams full responsibility for their code, from development to production. However, this often led to development teams being overwhelmed by an overwhelming number of operational tasks and tools, distracting them from their primary focus on developing business logic.

Platform Engineering addresses this issue by stating, "We give you the tools so you can build and run it easily." The platform team handles the complexity of the infrastructure and provides developers with an easy-to-use, automated self-service interface.

While DevOps is primarily a culture and philosophy of collaboration, communication, and automation, Platform Engineering is a technical discipline that underpins this culture with the right tools and processes. The focus of Platform Engineering is on Developer Experience (DevEx) – the experience and productivity of developers. By integrating best practices into the platform, developers can focus on what they do best, making it easier for them to do the right thing. The key components of an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) include:

1. Infrastruktur-Provisionierung als Self-Service: Developers can request new environments for development, testing, or staging with just a click. The platform offers a standardized way to provision infrastructure, such as Kubernetes namespaces, databases, message queues, using tools like Terraform, Pulumi, or Crossplane.

2. CI/CD-Pipelines as a Service: Instead of developing CI/CD pipelines from scratch, the platform provides reusable and pre-configured pipeline templates. Developers only need to provide their application code and a simple configuration file, while the pipeline takes care of building, testing, security scanning, and deploying the application.

3. Integrierte Observability und Monitoring: A good platform collects logs, metrics, and traces from all applications and provides centralized dashboards (e.g., Grafana) and alerting mechanisms (e.g., Prometheus) for developers. This allows them to gain immediate insight into their application's behavior in production without having to build a complex monitoring setup themselves. The OpenTelemetry standard plays an increasingly important role in vendor-independent data collection.

4. Security and Compliance by Default: Security is integrated into the platform, following the principle of "Shift-left Security." Automated security scans for code (SAST) are performed during the development process.