There’s a risk that platform engineering will go the way of other “tech trends” in the past. For example, the idea of DevOps being a methodology was great, but it ended up just being another position in the pool of positions.
However, platform engineering has a shot at truly making an impact because it’s built on principles that people can really understand and work towards. This blog describes three principles to drive success with platform engineering.
They are:
- Developer Experience (DevEx)
- Customer Service Mindset
- Understanding Customer Need
DevEx
No one likes a poor experience, right? Whether it’s while you’re picking up your morning coffee, buying a new cell phone, or checking out a retail store, you want a good experience with the product you’re using.
That’s where Developer Experience, or DevEx, comes into play. DevEx focuses on the experience of the engineer using the platform you’ve built. You want to ensure that you’re delivering a platform that’s accessible, performant, and delivers the right features and functions.
As an example, let’s say the engineer or developer who requested the platform you’ve built asked for a GUI to interact with the platform. If you build a command-line interface (CLI) instead, regardless of the reason, that’s a DevEx failure.
A Customer Service Mindset
The second principle is the customer service mindset. For platform engineers, the clients are internal engineers and developers. When creating the platform for these clients, you need take the customer service aspect as seriously as the technology aspect. Think about how you’d want to be treated if you were the customer.
Technology doesn’t solve all our problems. If it did, all of our engineering issues would’ve been addressed long ago. Think about it – we’ve gone from having to manually rack and configure a server to clicking a button in a cloud portal. That’s a huge leap in technology, and yet our challenges persist. Some problems reside in the organization, or in other words, the people. Therefore, having a proper customer service mindset is key for any implementation.
Understanding What’s Necessary
Last but certainly not least is to think about what your clients actually need. While that may sound straightforward, chances are your clients or customers won’t be 100% sure what they need. You’ll have to decipher their requirements and figure out the best way to meet them.
For example, say an engineer wants to ensure that the current state of a workload/application stack running on a cluster is the desired state. You might conclude that some type of configuration management is needed. After diving further into configuration management for Kubernetes, you determine GitOps is the best solution here. As you dive deeper, you decide to go with ArgoCD.
The internal engineer or developer might not know anything about these products, nor do they need to. They just know that they need a way to ensure that the current state is the desired state.
As a Platform Engineer, it’s up to you to decipher requirements and provide solutions with your engineering abilities, customer service mindset, and understanding of your client.
Wrapping Up
Ironically enough, platform engineering isn’t really about the technology stacks being used. Platform engineering is more about ensuring that the platform you’re building actually works in the right way for the people who need it. Yes, knowledge about technology stacks is necessary, but platform engineering is, and will continue to be, so much more than that.
