With software now critical for companies worldwide, improving development and deployment velocity is a strategic priority. Platform engineering and DevOps have emerged as leading disciplines to optimize delivery through reusable libraries and process enhancements respectively. While their approaches differ, together they maximize productivity.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll unpack what platform engineering and DevOps are, key differences, how they complement each other, and the growth trajectory for both fields. Statistics and company use cases reinforce the concepts throughout. Read on to gain an in-depth understanding of two approaches poised to shape modern application building.
What is Platform Engineering?
Platform engineering focuses on designing, building and managing the underlying infrastructure to accelerate software delivery. The goal is creating a centralized “platform” that provides self-service access to reusable libraries, frameworks and automated services that teams can leverage to reduce redundant efforts.
These platforms encapsulate the complexity of various testing, deployment, and monitoring environments, freeing engineers to focus on application code rather than infrastructure management. They also enable standardization across teams by providing access to approved building blocks through common interfaces.
Capabilties offered range from container deployment, CI/CD pipelines, and predictive autoscaling to integrated storage, secrets management, and compliance controls. These are exposed through APIs and tooling that abstract unnecessary detail while enabling necessary customization.
Benefits of Platform Engineering
- Improves productivity by reducing time spent on infra management (up to 25-50% gains observed)
- Developer self-service facilitates faster prototyping and testing
- Promotes standardization and best practices for stability
- Enables focus on core product development rather than infrastructure
- Scalable foundations to support growing complexity
According to Gartner, 80% of companies are projected to have adopted internal developer platforms enabling self-service access by 2025.
Companies like Netflix, Shopify, and Spotify have built extensive internal platforms yielding DevOps benefits like faster innovation, improved reliability and enhanced automation. Common across them is leveraging platform engineering to scale up DevOps successes.
What is DevOps?
DevOps refers to the combination of software development (Dev) teams and IT operations (Ops). The goal is improving release velocity, quality and reliability through extensive automation, monitoring, and cross-functional collaboration.
Whereas the traditional model had siloed dev and ops, DevOps stresses shared ownership across the application lifecycle. Developers gain operational responsibilities while ops teams participate in planning and requirements. This culture enables designing applications for robustness and automation from the outset.
On a technical level, DevOps leverages practices like infrastructure-as-code, continuous integration/deployment, microservices and containerization. Increased automation and improved feedback loops let teams rapidly and safely release updates.
Benefits of DevOps
- Faster release cycles and feature delivery (200x more frequent releases)
- Improved system stability and application resiliency (50% less downtime)
- Higher product quality through extensive testing (60% fewer defects)
- Greater collaboration across teams
- Data-driven decisions from strong monitoring
For examples, companies adopting DevOps like Capital One, Walmart and JP Morgan have accelerated deployment frequencies from twice yearly to over 100x daily releases. They credit DevOps with improved quality, security and customer satisfaction.
Key Differences Between Platform Engineering and DevOps
While platform engineering and DevOps have synergistic outputs, their scope and approach differ significantly:
| Platform Engineering | DevOps | |
| Focus | Creating and managing the shared developer platform | Using the platform to accelerate application release cycles |
| Goals | Standardization, improved productivity | Automation, reduced cycle times |
| Tools | Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD systems | Git, Jenkins, Docker, Monitoring |
| Users | Internal teams only | External customers |
| Stage | Extends capabilities after DevOps adoption | Implemented first |
In summary, platform engineering lays the foundation while DevOps builds atop it to create customer experiences. Think platform engineering as the factory, DevOps as the product.
How Platform Engineering and DevOps Work Together
While having distinct focuses, platform engineering and DevOps are better together, amplifying their mutual benefits through an integrated model:
- Platform engineering enables large-scale DevOps adoption by standardizing tooling
- Patterns in DevOps tool usage influence platform priorities
- Together they increase release velocity, stability and consistency
- Hybrid model delivers optimal developer productivity
For example, HotelTonight implemented DevOps first, then added platform engineering upon reaching over 100 microservices and thousands of daily code commits. The Volume Engine platform now allows teams to self-provision standardized build, deployment and monitoring environments. This accelerated product experimentation while ensuring governance and reliability across properties.
As both disciplines mature, insights flow between them, with platforms absorbing increasingly advanced DevOps learnings and DevOps leveraging those foundations to focus higher up the stack. The output is maximized innovation velocity and system resilience.
Evolution and Growth Outlook
Both platform engineering and DevOps will continue growing in sophistication and enterprise adoption:
DevOps Maturity:
As outlined in the DevOps maturity model, companies evolve through stages of increasing collaboration, automation and monitoring. Typically beginning with siloed teams, they progress to integrated toolchains and practices eventually optimized through usage and benchmarking data.
For illustration, Cyara moved from quarterly releases with a complex deployment process to over 50 production updates per day. By standardizing environments and automating end-to-end testing, release confidence increased alongside velocity.
Expanding Platform Engineering:
While early efforts centered on foundational CI/CD, infrastructure and runtimes, platform scope continues expanding:
- Integrated security – secrets, certificates, scanning
- Advanced testing – automated performance profiling, fault injection
- Holistic observability – full-stack monitoring, alerting and log analysis
Capabilities grow based on observable patterns in what DevOps teams build custom solutions for. The platform assimilates these needs.
Growth Forecasts:
Analysts predict up to 80% of companies will adopt internal developer platforms by 2025. And Gartner forecasts the global DevOps market growing over 18% annually through 2028 as more industries digitally transform. Their synergistic strengths will drive extensive investment.
For starting or maturing adoption, we recommend:
- Implementing DevOps culture, practices and automation first
- Quantitatively assessing improvement opportunities
- Introducing platform engineering incrementally where duplication occurs
- Creating a centralized team accountable for the platform
Together, platform engineering and DevOps will continue revolutionizing software delivery for the next decade across verticals.
Conclusion
Platform engineering and DevOps take balanced approaches to optimizing modern software. Platform engineering empowers innovation velocity through reusable libraries. DevOps enhances ownership and feedback cycles. While differing in scope, they have an exponentially positive impact when combined.
Companies should look to adopt DevOps, then extend its capabilities through platform engineering for maximized speed, quality and scale. As software itself becomes differentiating infrastructure across verticals, these disciplines will only grow in enterprise importance.
