Platform Engineering
By 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams as internal providers of reusable services, components, and tools for application delivery.
1. Business Value
To help developers, data science engineers, and end users, and ease the pain of the valuable work they do, forward-thinking companies have begun building operational platforms. Liability lies between users and the support services they rely on.
2. How to Engineering a Distribution Scaling Platform
Platform engineering optimizes the developer experience and accelerates digital delivery.
3. Contribution of Platform Engineering to Business Strategy
- Create a secure foundation
- Digital acceleration
- Attract and retain talented people
- In case of used
Nike has built a “bridgeable platform” that combines “strategically relevant global business capabilities deployed using modular and composable technologies exposed through APIs.” Nike sees the platform allowing it to respond faster to change, shorten time to market, increase scalability and reduce operating costs. Politiet, Norway's police, has replaced its legacy middleware with a self-service developer platform. This increases developer autonomy and enables rapid product innovation while maintaining stability. Politiet also created a team with the necessary skills to build and maintain the platform.
4. Technical Profile and Value
Platforms provide a set of tools, capabilities, and processes curated by subject matter experts and packaged for ease of use by end users. The goal is a frictionless self-service experience that provides the right capabilities to enable users to do valuable work with as little cost as possible, increasing end-user productivity and reducing the burden on Surname. The platform should include everything the user group needs, presented in whatever way best suits their preferred workflow.
5. Main Implementation Steps
- Get started with internal developer portals (IDPs). Aim your initial platform-building efforts at IDPs, as they are the most developed and best-understood type of platform. Your experience will be expanded to other platforms in the future.
- Embed security into the platform. Platforms must embed security into users' workflows. Security teams need to “shift left,” embedding security controls into the production process as early as possible. Platform engineers should incorporate comprehensive, automated security and compliance testing as part of their testing suite.
- Don't expect to buy a turnkey platform. While some vendors may claim otherwise, any commercially available tools cannot provide the entire platform you need. It will take a significant amount of time and effort to customize a platform to your needs.