Platform Engineering: Accelerating Development and Deployment

The software development landscape is evolving rapidly, demanding unprecedented levels of speed, quality, and efficiency. To keep pace, organizations are turning to platform engineering. This innovative approach empowers development teams by providing a self-service platform that automates and streamlines infrastructure provisioning, deployment pipelines, and security. By bridging the gap between development and operations, platform engineering fosters standardization, and collaboration, accelerates time-to-market, and ensures the delivery of secure and high-quality software products. Let’s dive into how platform engineering can revolutionize your software delivery lifecycle.

The Rise of Platform Engineering

The rise of DevOps marked a significant shift in software development, bringing together development and operations teams for faster and more reliable deployments. As the complexity of applications and infrastructure grew, DevOps teams often found themselves overwhelmed with managing both code and infrastructure.

Platform engineering offers a solution by creating a dedicated team focused on building and maintaining a self-service platform for application development. By standardizing tools and processes, it reduces cognitive overload, improves efficiency, and accelerates time-to-market.

Platform engineers are the architects of the developer experience. They curate a set of tools and best practices, such as Kubernetes, Jenkins, Terraform, and cloud platforms, to create a self-service environment. This empowers developers to innovate while ensuring adherence to security and compliance standards.

Role of DevOps and Cloud Engineers

Platform engineering reshapes the traditional development landscape. While platform teams focus on building and managing self-service infrastructure, application teams handle the development of software. To bridge this gap and optimize workflows, DevOps engineers become essential on both sides.

Platform and cloud engineering are distinct but complementary disciplines. Cloud engineers are the architects of cloud infrastructure, managing services, migrations, and cost optimization. On the other hand, platform engineers build upon this foundation, crafting internal developer platforms that abstract away cloud complexity.

Key Features of Platform Engineering:

Let’s dissect the core features that make platform engineering a game-changer for software development:

Abstraction and User-Friendly Platforms:

An internal developer platform (IDP) is a one-stop shop for developers. This platform provides a user-friendly interface that abstracts away the complexities of the underlying infrastructure. Developers can focus on their core strength – building great applications – instead of wrestling with arcane tools.

But it gets better. Platform engineering empowers teams through self-service capabilities.This not only reduces dependency on other teams but also accelerates workflows and boosts overall developer productivity.

Collaboration and Standardization

Close collaboration with application teams helps identify bottlenecks and smooth integration and fosters a trust-based environment where communication flows freely.

Standardization takes center stage here. Equipping teams with a consistent set of tools for automation, deployment, and secret management ensures consistency and security.

Identifying the Current State

Before building a platform, it’s crucial to understand the existing technology landscape used by product teams. This involves performing a thorough audit of the tools currently in use, analyzing how teams leverage them, and identifying gaps where new solutions are needed. This ensures the platform we build addresses real-world needs effectively.

Security

Platform engineering prioritizes security by implementing mechanisms for managing secrets such as encrypted storage solutions. The platform adheres to industry best practices, including regular security audits, continuous vulnerability monitoring, and enforcing strict access controls. This relentless vigilance ensures all tools and processes are secure and compliant.

The Platform Engineer’s Toolkit For Building Better Software Delivery Pipelines

Platform engineering is all about streamlining and automating critical processes to empower your development teams. But how exactly does it achieve this? Let’s explore the essential tools that platform engineers rely on:

Building Automation Powerhouses:

Infrastructure as Code (IaC):

Tools like Terraform and Ansible are the popular choices for IaC. They automate infrastructure provisioning and configuration, eliminating manual errors and enabling consistent, repeatable deployments.

CI/CD Pipelines:

Tools like Jenkins and GitLab CI/CD are essential for automating testing and deployment processes, ensuring applications are built, tested, and delivered with speed and reliability.

Maintaining Observability:

Monitoring and Alerting:

Prometheus and Grafana is a powerful duo that provides comprehensive monitoring capabilities. Prometheus scrapes applications for valuable metrics, while Grafana transforms this data into easy-to-understand visualizations for troubleshooting and performance analysis.

All-in-one Monitoring Solutions:

Tools like New Relic and Datadog offer a broader feature set, including application performance monitoring (APM), log management, and real-time analytics. These platforms help teams to identify and resolve issues before they impact users proactively.

Site Reliability Tools To Ensure High Availability and Scalability:

Container Orchestration:

Kubernetes orchestrates and manages container deployments, guaranteeing high availability and seamless scaling for your applications.

Log Management and Analysis:

The ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) is the go-to tool for log aggregation and analysis. It provides valuable insights into system behavior and performance, allowing teams to maintain consistent and reliable operations.

Managing Infrastructure

Secret Management:

HashiCorp Vault protects secretes, centralizes, and manages sensitive data like passwords and API keys, ensuring security and compliance within your infrastructure.

Cloud Resource Management:

Tools like AWS CloudFormation and Azure Resource Manager streamline cloud deployments. They automate the creation and management of cloud resources, keeping your infrastructure scalable, secure, and easy to manage. These tools collectively ensure that platform engineering can handle automation scripts, monitor applications, maintain site reliability, and manage infrastructure smoothly.

The Future is AI-Powered:

The platform engineering landscape is constantly evolving, and AI is rapidly transforming how we build and manage software delivery pipelines. The tools like Terraform, Kubecost, Jenkins X, and New Relic AI facilitate AI capabilities like:

Enhance security
Predict infrastructure requirements
Optimize resource security
Predictive maintenance
Optimize monitoring process and cost

Conclusion

Platform engineering is becoming the cornerstone of modern software development. Gartner estimates that by 2026, 80% of development companies will have internal platform services and teams to improve development efficiency. This surge underscores the critical role platform engineering plays in accelerating software delivery and gaining a competitive edge.

With a strong foundation in platform engineering, organizations can achieve greater agility, scalability, and efficiency in the ever-changing software landscape. Are you ready to embark on your platform engineering journey?

Building a robust platform requires careful planning, collaboration, and a deep understanding of your team’s needs. At Mantra Labs, we can help you accelerate your software delivery. Connect with us to know more.

Did Netflix bring order to chaos?

Netflix didn’t just solve its own problem. They blazed the trail for a movement: platform engineering. Now, every company wants a piece of that action. What Netflix did was essentially build an internal platform that developers could innovate without dealing with infrastructure headaches, a dream scenario for any application developer or app development company seeking seamless workflows.

And it’s not just for the big players like Netflix anymore. Across industries, companies are using platform engineering to create Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs)—one-stop shops for mobile application developers to create, test, and deploy apps without waiting on traditional IT. According to Gartner, 80% of organizations will adopt platform engineering by 2025 because it makes everything faster and more efficient, a game-changer for any mobile app developer or development software firm.

All anybody has to do is to make sure the tools are actually connected and working together. To make the most of it. That’s where modern trends like self-service platforms and composable architectures come in. You build, you scale, you innovate.achieving what mobile app dev and web-based development needs And all without breaking a sweat.

Is Mantra Labs Redefining Platform Engineering?

We didn’t just learn from Netflix’s playbook; we’re writing our own chapters in platform engineering. One example of this? Our work with one of India’s leading private-sector general insurance companies.

Their existing DevOps system was like Netflix’s old monolith: complex, clunky, and slowing them down. Multiple teams, diverse workflows, and a lack of standardization were crippling their ability to innovate. Worse yet, they were stuck in a ticket-driven approach, which led to reactive fixes rather than proactive growth. Observability gaps meant they were often solving the wrong problems, without any real insight into what was happening under the hood.

That’s where Mantra Labs stepped in. Mantra Labs brought in the pillars of platform engineering:

Standardization: We unified their workflows, creating a single source of truth for teams across the board.

Customization: Our tailored platform engineering approach addressed the unique demands of their various application development teams.

Traceability: With better observability tools, they could now track their workflows, giving them real-time insights into system health and potential bottlenecks—an essential feature for web and app development and agile software development.

We didn’t just slap a band-aid on the problem; we overhauled their entire infrastructure. By centralizing infrastructure management and removing the ticket-driven chaos, we gave them a self-service platform—where teams could deploy new code without waiting in line. The results? Faster workflows, better adoption of tools, and an infrastructure ready for future growth.

But we didn’t stop there. We solved the critical observability gaps—providing real-time data that helped the insurance giant avoid potential pitfalls before they happened. With our approach, they no longer had to “hope” that things would go right. They could see it happening in real-time which is a major advantage in cross-platform mobile application development and cloud-based web hosting.

The Future of Platform Engineering: What’s Next?

As we look forward, platform engineering will continue to drive innovation, enabling companies to build scalable, resilient systems that adapt to future challenges—whether it’s AI-driven automation or self-healing platforms.

If you’re ready to make the leap into platform engineering, Mantra Labs is here to guide you. Whether you’re aiming for smoother workflows, enhanced observability, or scalable infrastructure, we’ve got the tools and expertise to get you there.