As enterprise infrastructures scale in both complexity and size, interests in platform engineering become a natural segue. Capable of streamlining the underlying infrastructure that supports software development and operations, platform engineering plays a key role in how modern applications are successfully built and managed.
Bassam Chahine, professional services consultant, Instaclustr, joined DBTA’s webinar, Enterprise Platform Engineering, the Open Source Way, to discuss the ways platform engineering can modernize application infrastructure—and do so with the multitude of advantages that open source has to offer.
Chahine explained that to understand platform engineering, you must understand the role of DevOps. DevOps is the de facto methodology for software development, combining development (Dev) and operations (Ops) to unite people, processes, and technology. While successful at enabling coordination and collaboration between siloed teams, DevOps is not without its challenges.
Once the cloud had emerged on the scene in 2006, DevOps became much more complex due to the proliferation of tools, shadow operations, and other intricate processes. There developed a need for an internal development platform (IDP) and team—from which platform engineering was born, according to Chahine.
Platform engineering is the logical extension of DevOps which eliminates the need for developers to learn and operate infrastructure tools and processes. By providing self-service capabilities to DevOps and a standard set of tools and services, platform engineering abstracts various infrastructure complexities and improves the developer experience and productivity.
Platform engineering and IDP covers four key areas, noted Chahine, which include the following:
- Assist with infrastructure automation
- Integration of deployment using CI/CD
- Configuration and operation of tools
- Central user access and control
A method of establishing and achieving effective platform engineering is through open source technology, which offers a variety of advantages from eliminating licensing costs and vendor lock-in to faster time-to-market, battle-tested technology, thriving communities, and more.
Instaclustr by NetApp acts as a one-stop shop for open source platform engineering, providing the IDP, its deployment and operations, open source tools and data technologies, as well as expertise and services to support platform engineering initiatives. Chahine then walked webinar viewers through a demo of Instaclustr’s platform, combined with a look at the database technologies and extended tools compatible.
For the full, in-depth webinar featuring use cases, a Q&A, and more, you can view an archived version of the webinar here.