How DevOps is evolving into platform engineering

Ten years ago, people were asking whether they should adopt DevOps. Today, it is hard to find a company without elements of DevOps, as it's become a standard practice for modern software development. Thanks to widely adopted DevOps practices for the last decade, we've been enjoying more frequent, stable deployments.

[ Learn how to explain DevOps in plain English ]

What makes DevOps so attractive is that it is not just a separate, dedicated approach you implement on its own. It goes side by side with agile practices in software development. Production issues are no longer left to the ops team; the dev team is there to help investigate and fix them. Because of these advantages, very few particular industries still use the waterfall approach in software development.

DevOps has influenced organizational structure as we know it today. Some may argue that their company has DevOps because they have site reliability engineers (SREs) and DevOps engineers, but they may not have a DevOps philosophy. This may be because complete DevOps is hard to achieve and may not be necessary for many companies. But DevOps elements like continuous integration, continuous delivery (CI/CD), and continuous feedback are widespread across the industry.

It makes a difference when you have a dedicated technical role focused on automation. DevOps engineers can focus on CI/CD, infrastructure automation, integrating test automation, and other elements of automation.

DevOps is evolving into platform engineering

Platform engineering is the next big thing in the DevOps world. It has been around for a few years. Now the industry is shifting toward it, with more companies hiring platform engineers or cloud platform engineers.

Platform engineering opens the door for self-service capabilities through more automated infrastructure operations. With DevOps, developers are supposed to follow the "you build it, you run it" approach. However, this rarely happens, partly because of the vast number of complex automation tools. Since more and more software development tools are available, platform engineering is emerging to streamline developers' lives by providing and standardizing reusable tools and capabilities as an abstraction to the complex infrastructure.

Platform engineers focus on internal products for developers. Software developers are their customers, and platform engineers build and run a platform for developers. Platform engineering also treats internal platforms as a product with a heavy focus on user feedback.

Platform teams and the internal development platform scale out the benefits of DevOps practices. From my perspective, the industry will increase its focus on simplifying developers' lives and standardizing their tools by providing an abstraction that the platform team runs.

[ Download The path to GitOps to put the right tools, workflows, and structures in place to enable a complete GitOps workflow. ] 

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In 2022, Enable Architect published many articles to help enterprise architects and their teams improve their DevOps implementation. These articles offer advice and insights you can put to work in your organization.

Look at the top eight DevOps articles of 2022, and please let us know by emailing enable-architect@redhat.com what DevOps (or other) topics you would like to read or write about in 2023.