Monday August 21st 2023 by socraticDev
A new concept is getting traction in the software realm: platform engineering. A seductive idea that is getting (mis-)interpreted in various ways. Probably due to my background in Philosophy, I am keen to examine it with an open mind to assess its value. Is it hype? Is it really the solution to all problems in software development?
"Platform engineering is the discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations in the cloud-native era. Platform engineers provide an integrated product most often referred to as an “Internal Developer Platform” covering the operational necessities of the entire lifecycle of an application."
Luca Galante, "What is platform engineering"
what makes a great platform engineer?
Camille Fournier, a platform team manager, stresses that the main qualities of a great platform engineer are not technical. Patience, empathy, and communication skills are traits she is looking for when hiring new teammates.
Platform teams often attract developers wanting to play with the latest tech and hungry to build bleeding edge systems. However, according to Camille Fournier, building such systems are not how a platform engineer delivers value.
First of all, platform engineers must understand "stream-aligned developers"; i.e. developers who build features for which customers pay for. With patience and empathy a great platform engineer caters to developers. Understanding what is slowing them, how their current systems work, and how to help them migrate their stuff to the platform; often doing the migration for them.
Basically, a great platform engineer priority is offering a great "customer experience" to development teams. Building next-generation systems is but only one way to do so.
platform engineering is not a silver bullet
Dave Farley, an Independent Software Developer and Consultant, Founder and Director of Continuous Delivery Ltd., has lately expressed reluctance toward the concept of platform engineering. According to him building platforms useful for non-trivial distributed systems is not possible. First and foremost it is not possible to build highly generic systems right the first time. It must be an iterative process.
Being an experienced software engineer, he puts forward a probable scenario that proves "platforming" to be a vain enterprise. Let's say a large organization platform team decides to build a "generic Account module" that could be consumed by different teams whose systems use the concept of Account. According to Dave Farley, it won't be too long before a single team needs some special feature to their Account entity. Perhaps the finance team will need to comply with "know your customer" (kyc) regulations to avoid money laundering. What follows? They ask platform team to add a kyc feature to their generic Account entity; thus potentially breaking other teams Account module. Or, the finance team would stop using the generic module to build their own instead; thus losing useful capabilities such as single-sign-on (sso).
Platform engineering sounds like a great idea: removing all complex and difficult challenges from stream-aligned development teams and let a siloed team of experts solve it for them.
But that will never work!
Thinking that platform engineering will enable businesses to outsource features development to low-skilled code monkeys is a vain dream.
Instead, I agree with Dave Farley, to insist that software engineers are skilled professionals. They must be supported in managing complexity via proven strategies such as:
- abstraction and information hiding;
- good separation of concerns;
- sound use of modularity;
- high cohesion and low coupling designs.
an institution
Platform engineering teams should be seen as a form of internal institution to an organization.
"Institutions (singular: institution) are humanly devised structures of rules and norms that shape and constrain individual behavior.All definitions of institutions generally entail that there is a level of persistence and continuity. Laws, rules, social conventions and norms are all examples of institutions.Institutions vary in their level of formality and informality"
"Institutions", Wikipedia.org, 2023-08-21
As an institution, a platform engineering team ensures the continuity of an organization's software products. It is conscious of its past, mindful of its present, and prepares its future. As much as it constrains stream-aligned development teams, it helps them achieve desired outcomes:
- easier to maintain systems;
- safer systems;
- faster development cycles;
- etc.
sources
Continuous Delivery YouTube channel - Platform Engineering Is The New Kid On The Block
