It’s a Digital Transformation Age! Organizations are looking to continually improve and innovate to gain a competitive advantage among others. Efficient deployment mechanisms and operations enable the team to achieve faster delivery to the end users. To attain the same, companies have built dedicated teams with a common platform and this practice is named Application and Platform Engineering. The technology and application development teams still hold the responsibility for creating, deploying and executing the applications, but they use the common platform in a self-service manner to simplify the operational process.
The rise of container orchestration, microservices, and related fields has posed strong engineering challenges, and many organizations have deployed platform engineering teams to shoulder these additional responsibilities. However, the role hasn’t changed drastically from other DevOps roles. On the other hand, this service has increased in popularity and expanded cloud providers, infrastructure, and Kubernetes as code. Companies embrace Platform Engineering Services because it assists the development team to deliver software releases in a faster manner, and the Platform Engineers automate the workflow from coding to final delivery.
Digital Platform Engineering Services offerings:
Platform Engineering experts deliver a wide range of services that enables the service provider as well as the client a cutting-edge of the digital landscape. The solutions and results-driven ethos is confined to the organization’s business requirements. Regardless of the company size and experience of the professionals, the service offerings to gain competitive advantage includes
- Integrated user experience-centric approach and design
- DevOps Capabilities
- Iterative, agile, and rapid development application methodologies
- Rapid Prototyping
- Data Analytics
- Quality Engineering
- Integration and development of voice/bot interfaces
The Key Benefits of Application and Platform Engineering
It is highly beneficial to businesses working in cloud-native environments. The aim of Platform Engineering is to boost the developers through a self-service manner by furnishing an impactful developer experience. The integrated product developed through such practice fulfills DevOps benefits and reaps a good competitive edge over other organizations.
1.Faster Development Cycle
In case of the absence of platform engineering, the manual configuration, and creation of a repository, cloud infrastructure management, CI/CD pipeline creation, and non-automation of the process will incur manual error and it also takes a lot of time. As Platform Engineering heavily focuses on the automation of processes, the developer can code it faster due to the automation platform. The development cycle will speed up tremendously with the fully automated test cases and pipeline integration, which value add to the customers without compromising on speed or quality. As the result, the time to market will be reduced.
2.Operational Complexity would be reduced
Self Service deployments for applications and infrastructure removes the process complexity. Platform Engineering Services automates the complete DevOps cycle, thus resulting in increased productivity and taking off the burden from developers. Unlike the traditional approach, where the developers need to depend upon the DevOps team for the creation and maintenance of software deployments, in the modern approach of platform engineering, developers are autonomous, and they use self-service portals for software releases.
3. High Standard Product Development
For instance, if the developer has to do a change in microservices-based applications, firstly he needs to stag and then to production as it’s an environment with multi-cluster Kubernetes. This certainly requires the developer to be proficient with Kubernetes skills, Terraform modules, and helm charts. Small companies cannot afford to hire super-skilled developers. However, with the help of Platform Engineering, developers can offload their work to the Ops team, as they can ship the code with a few clicks to any environment without mastering its complexities. This in turn improves feedback among team members and thus results in much high-standard product which adds business value to the clients.
4. Application scale-up through automation
Platform Engineers assist the developers in a full fledge automation environment. Developers without an understanding of what’s happening in the background, create, remove, replicate, and update the deployment environment. In such a case, even a junior developer can self-service a fully provisioned environment that needs to deploy and test. Automating the environment empowers the organization to scale effectively and quickly.
When an organization requires Platform Engineering Team?
- When the organization wants the core team to focus on product development. If you want the application development team to focus on product development, & not to get diverted in activities like code pipelines, infrastructure provisioning, secrets management, etc. You should certainly look for platform engineering services.
- When the organization has a growing dynamic engineering team.
If your engineering team faces an immense challenge when wanting to scale the application, you can adopt platform engineering. - The application development team requires a continuous and constant innovation
Platform Engineering is much required when you have a strong talented permanent workforce, and you are looking for constant improvements and innovation on cloud-native applications.
Now that, you understand the reaping benefits of deploying the Application and Platform Engineering, it is of utmost importance to build your own platform, providing an agile and seamless deployment circumstance to your developers. Equipped with dynamic features, developers can quickly work on the deployment environment with their existing tools and techniques, like Kubernetes, Terraform, Docker, Helm, AWS, etc. Strong integration with the DevOps toolchain makes developers efficient and autonomous with software releases making life and work easier.