Platform engineering

Platform engineering is the discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations. It provides comprehensive and consistent tools and processes, which enables developers to focus on software development instead of managing underlying toolchains. Platform engineering isn’t solely about the tools and components. It’s also about alignment within the organization with a special focus on understanding user needs — in this case, your software engineering teams.

Key Components of Developer Platform

There are 5 core components to create successful developer platforms.

• Application Configuration Management: Manage application configuration in a dynamic, scalable and reliable way. For example: Chef, Puppet, Ansible
• Infrastructure Orchestration: Orchestrate your infrastructure in a dynamic and intelligent way depending on the context. For example: Terraform, Jenkins, Kubernetes
• Environment Management: Enable developers to create new and fully provisioned environments whenever needed. For example: Spacelift, Env0, vCluster
• Deployment Management: Implement a delivery pipeline for Continuous Delivery or even Continuous Deployment (CD). For example: CircleCI, TravisCI,
• Role-Based Access Control: Manage who can do what in a scalable way. For example: Cerbos, Casbin

Platform Engineering Maturity Model

CNCF’s initial Platforms Definition white paper describes what internal platforms for cloud computing are and the values they promise to deliver to enterprises. But to achieve those values an organization must reflect and deliberately pursue outcomes and practices that are impactful for them, keeping in mind that every organization relies on an internal platform crafted for its own organization - even if that platform is just documentation on how to use third party services. Platform engineering maturity model provides a framework for that reflection and for identifying opportunities for improvement in any organization.

	Aspect	Provisional	Operational	Scalable	Optimizing
Investment	How are staff and funds allocated to platform capabilities?	Voluntary or temporary	Dedicated team	As product	Enabled ecosystem
Adoption	Why and how do users discover and use internal platforms and platform capabilities?	Erratic	Extrinsic push	Intrinsic pull	Participatory
Interfaces	How do users interact with and consume platform capabilities?	Custom processes	Standard tooling	Self-service solutions	Integrated services
Operations	How are platforms and their capabilities planned, prioritized, developed and maintained?	By request	Centrally tracked	Centrally enabled	Managed services
Measurement	What is the process for gathering and incorporating feedback and learning?	Ad hoc	Consistent collection	Insights	Quantitative and qualitative