What is Platform Engineering and how it fits into DevOps and Cloud world

So in addition to application development, they still have some non-functional requirements that they need to worry about, although the scope of that has been greatly reduced by distributing it to the

platform

team and this means that DevOps engineers are still needed on the development teams. products, but now they have shared their cognitive load and don't need to have deep experience in the

cloud

, Kubernetes, and Helm charts monitoring security compliance development and hundreds of other things because they are now focused on properly using those non-functional tools in instead of operating them, so the work is more focused and easier through this low spread, but they still need to perform those tasks correctly and they need experience using those tools, but this is where it gets even more interesting, as I said, the

platform

is also a product, it is a product for the application teams. the same way you need to add features, make the UI more user friendly, offer services for cool new tools, fix bugs in the platform, develop terraform modules and use git, Ops, create pipelines for your infrastructure like code underlying the platform again if you have a separate

cloud

or on-premises infrastructure team or security team you need to work closely with them to create your platform product, so this means that a platform like the application needs development I continue with many iterations of feedback and close contributions.

Gathering from end users who are primarily application teams but sometimes also government and compliance people because they need access to information about whether systems are compliant across organizations, so all of these that I just described and list are actually processes that require DevOps because they are the same processes we use. in application development, so you have tons of DevOps processes required in the platform development process, which would logically mean that you might need a separate DevOps engineer role in the platform team and now, Actually, as we know, when it comes to DevOps there are many variations of how organizations implement that.

It could be that companies hire platform engineers who perform DevOps and cloud

engineering

tasks and will simply call it a platform engineer role, so different job titles and the same skills could be

what

moves engineers from the product teams completely to form a separate platform team, but this would create a gap in the application teams because, as I said, you still need someone to create Kubernetes manifest files or create CI/CD pipelines and integrate them with various platforms so that companies can make these tasks part of the developer's job, so you may have application teams without a dedicated DevOps engineer role where developers take care of those tasks, something that already It is practiced in many organizations, but the bottom line is whether you have a dedicated DevOps engineer role in both. teams or not, you need DevOps processes both in application and platform development and in how companies decide to structure teams and roles that will likely vary across organizations.

So based on that, you're essentially going to end up with an application or product DevOps team and On a platform DevOps team, now there's a question we get asked a lot, so I want to address it here in this context. Many people ask which of these parts we teach in our DevOps bootcamp and courses. Do we teach the DevOps side of the application or the platform? DevOps site and this question became much more common since the introduction of the platform feature in our DevOps bootcamp, you actually learn both parts of managing and operating DevOps or configuring the tools as well as using those tools to streamline the development process, for example, our Kubernetes.

The administrator course is completely about configuring and managing the cluster, as the name also suggests, which would be part of the platform engineers' responsibility, while in the Kubernetes module in our DevOps bootcamp you will mainly learn the using Kubernetes, but also the part of configuring monitoring and configuring alerts on the cluster or configuring the load balancer and automatically deploying to the cluster from a city pipeline, for example when it comes to infrastructure as code with terraform of the that we talk about here at The Bootcamp   you will learn how to automatically provision AWS infrastructure like ec2 servers or eks cluster, but you will also learn how to use existing terraform modules and integrate them into the application's CI/CD pipeline, for example, and the same with all the other tools we cover in The Bootcamp Jenkins, the following source repository for darker images, we basically provision these tools from scratch on dedicated virtual machines, then write infrastructure code scripts to automate the provisioning and configuration of these tools, learn things like installing plugins and doing Jenkins administration, creating user and access cleanup policies and Nexus, for example, for tasks that would actually be part of the platform. engineer skills, but we also use these tools to configure application pipelines in Jenkins, learn different types of pipelines and how to configure them, how to integrate and connect them to various other tools or upload application artifacts to Nexus and create those repositories in Nexus, etc. and then in the gitlab cic course, for example, it's very similar: you learn not only how to set up the CI/CD pipeline for your microservices application, but also the architecture of gitlab CI/CD and how to configure Runners locally and on AWS Virtual Machine on how to configure different agents on those Runners based on the tasks in your pipeline, which again would be knowledge that the platform engineer would need, so we've had for a long time a DevOps engineer who needs to have this skill set to configure the cluster. and use the cluster to configure and secure the AWS infrastructure and use the infrastructure to deploy and run applications.

Now these tasks and roles are divided and rightly so not because knowing both is too overwhelming or because you can't know everything. I definitely love knowing and doing. Both parts and I've been working on them in my projects and you can really learn them, but in reality, depending on how complex a project is, it may be unrealistic for one person or role to have the time and capacity in their job to do both. things, so you can decide

what

to do with all your DevOps knowledge after finishing the Bootcamp or courses. You can join the platform team and use your knowledge there to configure and manage tools and build the developer platform with the knowledge, or you can join the development team. and streamline the app development and release processes there while being the interface or intermediary between the platform team and your app team and what is absolutely obvious is that you can do any of these jobs much better when you have the full picture and the complete knowledge of these tools from both perspectives because as a platform engineer you need to work closely with the application teams and understand their processes to find any bottlenecks or elements needed across the teams that can be standardized to get the complete knowledge of Understanding both sides, as we teach in our courses and bootcamp, can make the job much easier because you understand both sides.

If you want to watch any of our courses, I will leave the information in the video description and the final topic I want to address is what is the difference between platform and cloud engineer. Well, generally speaking, platform

engineering

is an improvement on all other concepts like DevOps Cloud SRE, as we saw throughout this video, but if we boil it down to the main differences, the cloud engineer needs to know the services of the cloud, being an expert in that, usually even specializing in one of the cloud platforms, so they need to know how to migrate from on-premises to the cloud, how to set up a hybrid infrastructure, manage storage and copies security and cloud, manage cloud costs, basically everything related to the cloud and they should be able to combine cloud services to build the infrastructure. that suits the needs of the business, but the platform actually has a broader range of knowledge than tools outside of the cloud only and they actually build a platform that developers or product teams can use for self-service any resources they need in addition to cloud resources and various other tools, so they are basically taking the infrastructure and service that AWS, for example, offers to a custom platform as a service for the company's internal teams, so They essentially build a layer on top of the cloud with a bunch of cloud services as well as other services and tools that are not part of the cloud and I'm sure, as always, that each project will look different and implement these concepts in various ways. ways.

Many companies will hire DevOps engineers as platform engineers. Many cloud engineers will likely become platform engineers, as well as at smaller companies. Platform engineers. You will likely take on a DevOps role at a larger company. The cloud team will work with the platform team and share their expertise so that the cloud layer has the platform layer on top and this may be the case for a while until an industry standard evolves. a standard way of structuring. teams, it could be a large company that successfully implements this at scale and then other companies can basically replicate that successful model, so we have some type of standardization there, but in essence, that is the foundation and from the perspective of a engineer, it really helps you in your job search as well as doing your job correctly when you hire for a specific role, when you understand these differences and the vision of responsibility it is because then you can guide your team or you can guide your company to have more clarity around these roles.

Also, we have talked about a lot of things in this video and I really hope that I was able to help you understand what exactly platform engineering is, how it

fits

into the existing

world

of DevOps and the cloud, and I hope that you gained some valuable insights from this video. that you can use practically in your own work or   in general in your career and with that, thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video! :)