Platform Engineering vs DevOps

What’s the difference between DevOps, Continuous Delivery and Platform Engineering, is Platform Engineering really the next big thing. You could ask “what’s in a name” fundamentally what we do matters more than how we name what we do, but the names that we use for ideas can help. Most people don’t do deep research into what works best for software development, which may be a shame because how we choose to organise our work has a huge impact on how well we can do that work. This means that if people only have a cursory view of ideas like platform engineering, DevOps or CD, then it is easy to mistake their advantages, and what is involved.

In this episode, Dave Farley best-selling author of “Continuous Delivery” and “Modern Software Engineering” explores these ideas and describes why, in his view, Platform Engineering is no replacement for either DevOps or Continuous Delivery.

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#developer #DevOps #platformengineering

[milobem]

In my experience DevOps usually means "We don't need an Operations team anymore. Developers can do it in their spare time"

[MobiusCoin]

I recently got thrown on a few devops projects at work. It took a while to figure it out but then I was like "oh, I'm just programming for the other devs on my team rather than the end user".

[ryanslab]

I’m a devops engineer. I like platform engineering because it puts devops teams into a product mindset. Products they give their customers, the internal users and developers.

[brownhorsesoftware]

Excellent video! Since early in my career, when people asked about my process, I would just say: "Make something that runs. Keep it running."

[ssg]

For me, devops and CD are philosophies and not roles. It's a way of doing things - flow, feedback and learning. Agile is the what, and CD is the how.

[cbaesemanai]

devops is the jack of all trades. Programmer, Operations, Automation, DBA, QA, cloud, Builds, Architect, infrastructure.

[MatiasKiviniemi]

IMO the fundamental thing in devops is the lack of organisational division between development and operations, having a team that both creates code and is responsible operational quality. Just having a CICD-pipeline doesn't count if you have one team pushing updates and other team being responsible of managing operational issues and creating bug reports. E2E responsibility is the key. Some of the greatest triumphs of mine have included first adding logging in code, deploying those and then creating monitoring scripts to pick them up and refining them, creating alerts, eventually leading to understanding the root cause.

[PlatformOS]

In platformOS, we often use the phrase "automated DevOps" to indicate that our partners will not have to worry much about the underlying infrastructure. We have built abstraction layer using GraphQL, which allows us to take care of the operations and allow developers to focus on continuously delivering :) value to their business.
After watching your video, we might want to think harder about our slogan, though!

[kayakMike]

This is a good review of the central ideas to create a successful software development team.

[ulrichborchers]

Also this video speaks so much from my heart. This understanding of the "idea" of collaboration is how the world really should be, wether it be in IT or in any other field.

For a while it gave me a hard time wondering why people were misusing the term "DevOps" (with "Platform" it seems to be the same thing as I understand it) in such an obviously "dumb" way by drawing boundaries and using "DevOps" (or "Platform") even as a name for a department to set themselves apart from others.

Or it might be management which is dividing the "resources" (aka people). To then speak of a "team" is pure irony and part of the same misuse of actual concepts and people.

The underlying problem is deeply embedded in the "system" and of how a business works: through competition. This is completely against the idea of collaboration which is so deeply embedded in our culture that the same thinking is applied also from inside of organizations and even encouraged.

Quality is a consciously unwanted anti pattern in those environments because collaboration is regarded as a thread there. The ones who are good at it could otherwise outsmart the ones who are not. Or the ability itself is misused by individuals out of personal interests over the interests of the whole group, sacrificing product quality.

While the scientific view of the world should always be defended, for example by talking about what best practices, proven techniques and terms for those really mean, the very basic and archaic way of human life will always try to neglect it. That is what we also are on the other side of the coin.

[wdeviers]

In my decades of doing "OpsDev" (I'm operations first!) -- this is perhaps the best single video I've seen covering this wide array of topics in an approachable way. I'm building a badging program at work and this video is climbing to the top of the "prerequisites" playlist. Thank you!

[donstratton]

What's in a name?
We used to call it evolution in the 80's. But that evolution began with an impact analysis on process efficiency and system components then publishing a return on investment calculation (unless the change was mandated by a regulatory body).

[AllanSavolainen]

Ultimate form of devops, use PHP, every http call builds your app. Develop directly on production, immediate deployment after you hit save.

[ssssssstssssssss]

It can be good to be picky with words. It helps with clear understanding and gaining a clear picture. The reason for so much confusion is because software engineers, marketing staff, consultants and more and have not been picky with words. In some cases they have maliciously abused terminology.

[DarrenLewis-wo]

Semantics matter because I've worked in and observed many software and infrastructure development and maintenance teams that take the meanings to heart and plant a flag on the molehill in destructive ways.

[sebastianpopa]

this space is full of fairly clear and good intentions expressed as confusing, overlapping, rarely repeatable definitions, which, when taken to extreme, get one into some mythical places (for example the idea that people are "devops", hence they do requirements collection, design and implementation of front and backends, pipelines, dashboards, on-call, supporting operations and everything under the sun). Related, the "what's in the name" is important if one wants to avoid the cognitive load - "devops" seems more clear (have devs and ops collaborate closely - same team preferably) than "continuous delivery", which sounds like half of the solution, in the sense of "ok, what about after delivery?" "Platform engineering" by definition is "the practice of planning and providing such computing platforms to developers and users", which is immediately strikingly odd (since users and devs are really not alike). Tongue in cheek - we should enlarge these definitions even more - include psychology (at least mention therapy) and the little print which states that "business" can still layoff anyone for whatever immediate cost reduction they could fathom. Back to the subject, maybe a simple "hey, do this, try to avoid doing that" might suffice for most

[manishm]

For me, "continuous delivery" is about delivering value to the hands of customers. Not just getting code into production. The company i work for atm often uses release flags to deploy code, which then sits inactive and unused for months...

[deanschulze]

This video touches on what software development has become in the last decade. You have application code. You have IAC code in Terraform, Cloudfromation, Pulumi, etc. You have pipeline code in github actions, etc.

What does this mean for TDD? I'd like to hear how you would TDD your way to a realistic cloud application, for example a real-time data pipeline in one of the clouds. Is TDD even relevant for provisioning resources in the cloud?

[waynepeacock]

When I see or hear "DevOps" nowadays it's generally referring to InfraOps and/or Deployment and Observability Tooling.

True DevOps is what engineering teams do as part of taking responsibility for the operation of their software.

[Lorryslorryss]

Yeah. CD and DevOps are approaches that focus on working in a lean way and focusing on shared goals.

Unfortunately, DevOps allows 'DevOps developers' on 'DevOps teams' to completely miss the point. It also allows people in product and elsewhere to think they arent needed for that lean shared goal stuff.