Platform Engineering unblocks enterprise development teams, allowing them to focus on building the products and services that deliver value to their customers. DevOps principles have been highly focused on this effort for some time, but we’re seeing more and more how these practices have evolved to support enterprise delivery teams. By improving Developer Experience (DevEx) and building self-service platforms, enterprise IT organizations are helping improve the “digital factory floor”, giving teams the things they need to deliver and removing the things that get in their way. In this post, we’ll take a high-level look at some of the drivers of business value for Platform Engineering and building enterprise delivery platforms.
Driving Efficiency and Scalability
Improving efficiency and scalability is often a primary driver of the work we do in IT organizations. Platform Engineering is fundamentally about constructing robust, intuitive platforms that break down barriers in a developer’s path to production, streamlining their ability to deliver value. By providing a platform (or many platforms) of self-service tools, services, and other delivery-focused capabilities, developers can iterate on creating value without the friction or toil often associated with building enterprise software. This not only accelerates product delivery but also enhances Developer Experience, making it easier for teams to innovate and adapt to changes in direction quickly.
By treating the platform as a product, platform teams constantly refine and evolve their products based on real user feedback from their customers, the developers. This feedback loop ensures that the platform remains relevant, effective, and user-friendly, reducing cognitive load and freeing up developers to focus on creating value. As a result, organizations can improve lead time for new features, and create a more scalable delivery model that is prepared to meet the needs of its customers.
Accelerating Time-to-Market
Platform Engineering brings an engineering-first approach to improving software delivery that significantly reduces the effort between a new idea and that idea reaching customers. By building internal platforms tailored to your specific organization, teams are able to deliver their products in the best way to meet both the needs of the organization as well as your customers.
Platforms offer a suite of tools, services, and capabilities designed for self-service consumption by developers, eliminating the need for direct intervention by operations teams. This self-service model not only maximizes developer productivity but also streamlines the delivery process, allowing for more rapid iteration and innovation.
At the heart of Platform Engineering is the promotion of a product mindset within internal platform teams. This mindset encourages the development of platforms as products that cater to the specific needs of development teams, enabling an environment where agility, efficiency, and quality are built in. Much of what platform teams provide can be described as “golden paths” or “paved roads” for delivery teams.
These capabilities are offered as a pre-approved delivery path to production that includes everything a team needs to ship their products without them needing to worry about the long lead time in approving new architectures and charting a new course through complex enterprise environments.
Some of the key capabilities enabled by Platform Engineering include:
- Internal Developer Platforms - Internal developer platforms like Backstage offer dev teams a custom-built portal for their tools and other platform offerings
- Automated CI/CD pipelines - Shared pipeline workflows, pipeline infrastructure, bring seamless integration and delivery processes that facilitate rapid release cycles
- Infrastructure as code - Tools such as Terraform or AWS CloudFormation enable the provisioning and management of infrastructure through code
- Self-service provisioning - Developers can spin up cloud infrastructure and development environment resources on-demand without waiting for operations
- Microservices architecture support - Support for microservice architectures enable teams to develop, deploy, and scale services independently, providing a path for smaller and faster product cycles
- Built-in observability and monitoring - Observability integrations and automated integration with logging, monitoring and tracing provides visibility into application performance and health, allowing for proactive issue resolution
- Security and compliance as code - Built-in security capabilities ensure that applications meet security standards from the start, reducing risk and manual auditing efforts
Enhancing Flexibility and Adaptability
Flexibility and adaptability are achieved through automation, offering self-service capabilities, and reducing cognitive load. Platforms allow teams to focus on innovation rather than being bogged down by complex infrastructure or redundant processes. The use of standardized tools and services across the enterprise allows for a consistent and predictable path to production for development teams. This standardization, coupled with the autonomy granted by self-service models, empowers teams to experiment and iterate rapidly without unnecessary delays.
Platform Engineering practices like building API-focused platforms help break down traditional silos and encourage direct, transparent communication, enabling collaboration across the organization. Additionally, by leveraging modern cloud technologies and microservices architectures, enterprises can improve scalability and resiliency practices. This positions the enterprise to better accommodate new technologies and market shifts without being restricted by their legacy platforms and infrastructure.
Case Study: Ritchie Bros. Digital Product Delivery Transformation
Ritchie Bros. (RBA), a global market leader in the industrial equipment industry, embarked on a pivotal transformation journey in February 2022, known as RB 2.0. This bold initiative was centered on leveraging technology to catalyze business growth through strategic acquisitions and diversifying their portfolio in the industrial equipment industry.
Challenge: Legacy applications and outdated software delivery frameworks impeded their progress. RBA began the adoption of a modern software delivery platform, but struggled to enable & upskill their employees to adopt the platform.
RBA partnered with Liatrio to accelerate continuous delivery, bringing modern engineering practices to their product engineering teams.
Legacy platforms and accumulated technical debt were limiting the effectiveness of online auctions and directly impacting organizational revenue targets. Feature development on the legacy platform had become cumbersome and inefficient for engineers. The launch of RB 2.0 promised improvement, but limited expertise in modern engineering practices essential to leverage the new platform was holding them back.
The Solution: Platform Engineering
Through collaboration with Liatrio, Ritchie Bros. accomplished a significant transformation of their Timed Sales Service (TSS) legacy system, all within the challenging span of a four-week holiday period. This project was a critical part of their RB 2.0 initiative, marking a significant step in their technological evolution. The transition of their bid engine from traditional VMs to a Kubernetes-based system, coupled with various other technological enhancements, was not just a task completed but a leap forward in modernizing their engineering methodologies. This transformation has now become a template for RBA's ongoing journey in continuous delivery.
The partnership's impact extended beyond technical upgrades; it was a catalyst for a cultural shift within RBA. Teams that once operated in silos were now part of a collaborative and innovative community, all thanks to the comprehensive performance and functional testing frameworks established. The case of RBA and Liatrio is a testament to the power of embracing modernization and the transformative impact it can have on an organization's journey towards continuous delivery and technological expertise.
Elevating Customer Experience
It’s important to note that Platform Engineering supports two types of customers: internal developers and external customers. The first and closest customers of the platform are developers and other internal engineering teams. Platform Engineering works first to enhance and accelerate developer experience and accelerate the delivery of value.
By enabling developers to focus on creating value rather than navigating platform complexities, enterprises can rapidly iterate on customer feedback, continuously improving the customer experience.
The adoption of Platform Engineering ensures that products are not only delivered faster but also meet the high standards customers expect. This alignment between rapid delivery and customer needs directly elevates the experience of the product and services you’re delivering every day. The high degree of automation and standardization reduces the margin for error in releases and ensures that customers can enjoy a stable and reliable product.
Through the emphasis on continuous feedback and learning, it enables businesses to adapt to changing customer needs and market conditions, keeping the customer experience aligned with product development efforts.
Security and Compliance
Platform Engineering is fundamental in enhancing Security and Compliance within enterprises by providing a layer of tools and services that embed security capabilities directly into the SDLC. By establishing a platform of specialized tools and automation, enterprises can seamlessly integrate security validation and compliance measures into every phase of software development and deployment. This well established “shift-left” approach ensures that security is not an afterthought but a core component of product development, leading to more secure end-products and a reduction in vulnerabilities that could be exploited.
Through automated pipelines and self-service platforms, developers can receive immediate feedback on security scans, code analysis, and compliance checks, enabling quick remediation of issues. This level of automation and integration facilitates an immediate response to emerging threats and changes in compliance requirements, keeping enterprises ahead of risks.
Regulated enterprises require additional compliance controls. In order to meet the needs of these organizations, additional features such as automated governance, policy as code, and other GRC Engineering practices are now important components of enterprise delivery platforms. These capabilities have historically been manual stages in delivery and often added weeks or months to a product’s release cycle, but by automating these capabilities, enterprises see a massive improvement in lead time while also reducing risk.
Eliminating Redundancy
Often a primary goal of enterprise platforms, Platform Engineering streamlines software delivery by establishing standardized tools, services, and processes for internal engineering teams. This eliminates redundant efforts among development teams by allowing them to focus on delivering business value rather than navigating the complexity of diverse tools.
Centralizing platform capabilities and making them available as internal products ensures that best practices and efficiencies can be shared across the organization. This removes the otherwise duplicative or out-of-band work of setting up environments, compliance, security, and deployment processes.
By promoting a culture of shared responsibility and visibility, Platform Engineering bridges the gap between teams, ensuring their development resources are utilized efficiently. The consolidation of tools and processes under a platform-centric approach minimizes wasted effort in managing multiple, disparate systems.
Platform Engineering not only accelerates the delivery of products but also creates a more collaborative environment where teams can innovate more effectively without the burden of unnecessary work.
Cost Optimization and Resource Utilization Improvement
Platform Engineering ensures that every team benefits from high-quality infrastructure without each team needing to become experts in platform configuration. This elevation of infrastructure quality and efficiency naturally drives down costs associated with downtime, maintenance, and troubleshooting. This capability promotes shared knowledge and tool reuse across the enterprise and reduces redundancy and waste, as teams no longer need to invest resources in developing similar capabilities independently. Instead, they can leverage shared platform services, which optimizes resource utilization across the board.
Platform Engineering supports cost-effective use of managed services and cloud resources. By abstracting the complexity of these services behind simple, self-service interfaces or APIs, it allows teams to leverage the power of the cloud without needing to be experts in cloud services. This not only speeds up development but also ensures that resources are used efficiently, avoiding unnecessary expenditure on idle or over-provisioned resources.
Additionally, by adopting an “everything as code” approach to the platform, we’re able to reduce unnecessary creation of duplicate solutions by supporting an internal “innersource” model. These elements combined lead to significant cost optimization and improved resource utilization within the enterprise, making Platform Engineering an essential strategy for modern IT organizations aiming to deliver better software faster and more cost-effectively.
Conclusion
Platform Engineering is quickly becoming a core strategy of enterprise IT organizations. By developing robust, scalable platforms, this approach enables developers to navigate the complexities of software delivery without the burdens of traditional enterprise platforms. As a result, organizations can launch innovative, superior products at a much faster rate while ensuring their solutions maintain high quality. This not only accelerates product development cycles but also enhances the overall developer experience.
Platform Engineering catalyzes change by helping transform IT organizations into product organizations focused on innovation, scalability, and business outcomes. It lays the foundation for a seamless, efficient software delivery process that empowers developers to produce and release superior products quickly. This drives significant improvements in product delivery and developer experience, ultimately creating an environment where engineering creativity and business value can both coexist and thrive.
Interested in learning more about Platform Engineering? Check out our latest eBook: Platform Engineering for Enterprise IT Organizations.
