Common Mistakes in Platform Engineering
This blog was originally published in the Typo blog.
Platform engineering is a relatively new and evolving field in the tech industry. However, like any evolving field, it comes with its share of challenges. If overlooked can limit its effectiveness.
In this blog post, we dive deep into these common missteps and provide actionable insights to overcome them, so that your platform engineering efforts are both successful and sustainable.
What is Platform Engineering?
Platform Engineering refers to providing foundational tools and services to the development team that allow them to quickly and safely deliver their applications. This aims to increase developer productivity by providing a unified technical platform to streamline the process which helps reduce errors and enhance reliability.
Core Components of Platform Engineering
Internal Developer Platform (IDPs)
The core component of Platform Engineering is IDP i.e. centralized collections of tools, services, and automated workflows that enable developers to self-serve resources needed for building, testing, and deploying applications. It empowers developers to deliver faster by reducing reliance on other teams, automating repetitive tasks, reducing the risk of errors, and ensuring every application adheres to organizational standards.
Platform Team
The platform team consists of platform engineers who are responsible for building, maintaining, and configuring the IDP. The platform team standardizes workflows, automates repetitive tasks, and ensures that developers have access to the necessary tools and resources. The aim is to create a seamless experience for developers. Hence, allowing them to focus on building applications rather than managing infrastructure.
Automation and Standardization
Platform engineering focuses on the importance of standardizing processes and automating infrastructure management. This includes creating paved roads for common development tasks such as deployment scripts, testing, and scaling to simplify workflows and reduce friction for developers. Curating a catalog of resources, following predefined templates, and establishing best practices ensure that every deployment follows the same standards, thus enhancing consistency across development efforts while allowing flexibility for individual preferences.
Continuous Improvement
Platform engineering is an iterative process, requiring ongoing assessment and enhancement based on developer feedback and changing business needs. This results in continuous improvement that ensures the platform evolves to meet the demands of its users and incorporates new technologies and practices as they emerge.
Security and Compliance
Security is a key component of platform engineering. Integrating security best practices into the platform such as automated vulnerability scanning, encryption, and compliance monitoring is the best way to protect against vulnerabilities and ensure compliance with relevant regulations. This proactive approach is integrated into all stages of the platform helps mitigate risks associated with software delivery and fosters a secure development environment.
Common Mistakes in Platform Engineering
Focusing Solely on Dashboards
One of the common mistakes platform engineers make is focusing solely on dashboards without addressing the underlying issues that need solving. While dashboards provide a good overview, they can lead to a superficial understanding of problems instead of encouraging genuine process improvements.
To avoid this, teams must combine dashboards with automated alerts, tracing, and log analysis to get actionable insights and a more comprehensive observability strategy for faster incident detection and resolution.
Building without Understanding the Developers’ Needs
Developing a platform based on assumptions ends up not addressing real problems and does not meet the developers’s needs. The platform may lack important features for developers leading to dissatisfaction and low adoption.
Hence, establishing clear objectives and success criteria vital for guiding development efforts. Engage with developers now and then. Conduct surveys, interviews, or workshops to gather insights into their pain points and needs before building the platform.
Overengineering the Platform
Building an overlay complex platform hinders rather than helps development efforts. When the platform contains features that aren’t necessary or used by developers, it leads to increased maintenance costs and confusion among developers that further hampers their productivity.
The goal must be finding the right balance between functionality and simplicity. Hence, ensuring the platform effectively meets the needs of developers without unnecessary complications and iterating it based on actual usage and feedback.
Encouraging One-Size-Fits-All Solution
The belief that a single platform caters to all development teams and uses cases uniformly is a fallacy. Different teams and applications have varying needs, workflows, and technology stacks, necessitating tailored solutions rather than a uniform approach. As a result, the platform may end up being too rigid for some teams and overly complex for some resulting in low adoption and inefficiencies.
Hence, design a flexible and customizable platform that adapts to diverse requirements. This allows teams to tailor the platform to their specific workflows while maintaining shared standards and governance.
Overplanning and under-executing
Spending excessive time in the planning phase leads to delays in implementation, missed opportunities, and not fully meeting the evolving needs of end-users. When the teams focus on perfecting every detail before implementation it results in the platform remaining theoretical instead of delivering real value.
An effective way is to create a balance between planning and executing by adopting an iterative approach. In other words, focus on delivering a minimum viable product (MVP) quickly and continuously improving it based on real user feedback. This allows the platform to evolve in alignment with actual developer needs which ensures better adoption and more effective outcomes.
Failing to Prioritize Security
Building the platform without incorporating security measures from the beginning can create opportunities for cyber threats and attacks. This also exposes the organization to compliance risks, vulnerabilities, and potential breaches that could be costly to resolve.
Implementing automated security tools, such as identity and access management (IAM), encrypted communications, and code analysis tools helps continuously monitor for security issues and ensure compliance with best practices. Besides this, provide ongoing security training that covers common vulnerabilities, secure coding practices, and awareness of evolving threats.
Benefits of Platform Engineering
When used correctly, platform engineering offers many benefits:
- Platform engineering improves developer experience by offering self-service capabilities and standardized tools. It allows the team to focus on building features and deliver products more efficiently and effectively.
- It increases the reliability and security of applications by providing a stable foundation and centralized infrastructure management.
- Engineering teams can deploy applications and updates faster with a robust and automated platform that accelerates the time-to-market for new features and products.
- Focusing on scalable solutions allows Platform engineering to enable the underlying systems to handle increased demand without compromising performance and grow their applications and services efficiently.
- A solid platform foundation allows teams to experiment with new technologies and methodologies. Hence, supporting innovation and the adoption of modern practices.
Typo — An Effective Platform Engineering Tool
Typo is an effective platform engineering tool that offers SDLC visibility, developer insights, and workflow automation to build better programs faster. It can seamlessly integrate into tech tool stacks such as GIT versioning, issue tracker, and CI/CD tools.
It also offers comprehensive insights into the deployment process through key metrics such as change failure rate, time to build, and deployment frequency. Moreover, its automated code tool helps identify issues in the code and auto-fixes them before you merge to master.
Typo has an effective sprint analysis feature that tracks and analyzes the team’s progress throughout a sprint. Besides this, It also provides 360 views of the developer experience i.e. captures qualitative insights and provides an in-depth view of the real issues.
Conclusion
Platform engineering has immense potential to streamline development and improve efficiency, but avoiding common pitfalls is key. By focusing on the pitfalls mentioned above, you can create a platform that drives productivity and innovation.
All the best! :)
