Platform Engineering is a term that describes the practice of designing and developing tools that are used internally in a software project allowing the development teams to operate in a self-service environment. This collection of tools is commonly referred to as an IDP (Internal Development Platform) which supports the operational needs of a product’s lifecycle and elevates teams abilities, helping them to deliver a product that scales and is reliable.

While the practice comprises a wide range of interests and knowledge, this page only covers a few of the most crucial topics of how a Platform Engineering Team can be successfully implemented in your organisation.

Project Development

As the industry standard, most projects will be managed following a variation of the many Agile methodologies that exist. As such, during the development process the teams will be presented with requirement changes and new challenges. As the project grows, new patterns will surge, new tools will be evaluated and decisions will be made. At some point the way decisions are made and patterns applied may vary depending on who’s doing the work and making those decisions.

As part of the Platform Team responsibilities, design decisions and documentation should be created so that despite who’s doing the work, patterns and decisions are applied in the same way all across the project, creating consistency and giving it longevity. Consistency across the project is important as it reduces bugs and security issues and increases development speed as it allows multiple members of the project to be able to understand why and how the product is built.

Process automation

During the lifecycle of a project there are lots of processes that will be executed repeatedly. Some of these processes can consist of packaging a module version for release or rotating secrets for an integration. In the interest of efficiency, it’s usually not the best choice to have someone doing these repetitive tasks by hand or following an instruction set in order to complete them. To tackle this, the Platform team should produce a collection of automation tools that will complete these tasks in a timely manner and without the need of human intervention. These tools can come in the form of CI/CD pipelines, scripts or CLIs. Having automated tools gives multiple advantages to the development team and reduces multi-tasking. Manual tasks add to the toil of a developer. Reducing their time on repetitive tasks by automating them means that the developers can focus on solving problems rather than following an instruction set. Most importantly, having these repetitive tasks implemented with automated tools greatly reduces the chance of human error and security issues during the process while accelerating the time to completion. The reduction in multi-tasking leads the teams to become more efficient, more focused, more secure and less worried about boring and time consuming tasks that become part of the daily chores of a project lifecycle.

At Ikigai, our Platform Team has built a repository of templated GitHub Actions that are used across all of the project’s codebase. This way, all the workflows are consistent and similar to one another, allowing for easier and faster troubleshooting as well as quick propagation of changes without having to interact with multiple repositories. These templated actions allow for easy improvement of the workflows suite inside the project and a fast implementation of new workflows.

Take a look at an example of our templated workflows here. Reach out to our team to know more about this concept and how it can be introduced into your project and integrated with your codebase.

Deployments

Deployments are usually processes that are critical and very methodical, since if they don’t go as planned, there might be some downtime, hurting the project and the clients. In some cases the deployments might be done manually, following a step by step instruction set. Doing deployments manually is a difficult and intense task, since everything needs to be perfectly executed in order to be successful, and if we consider that the deployment process should be repeated for multiple environments, for example: test, staging and production, the task becomes even more complex and fragile. It’s also hard to write clear and concise Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for the teams to follow and execute successfully. Taking all of this into consideration, the criticality and intensiveness of the deployment procedure can lead to human errors like a badly typed command, skipped steps or similar situations.

With a Platform team, deployments should be automated and templated. By doing so, the process of deployment will be similar across multiple parts of the project and done without requiring manual steps. Templating these operations also allows the implementation of guard rails to prevent bad things from happening and gives the ability to iterate and improve when requirements change like security requirements. With the deployment automation, teams can keep working on their tasks while the deployment is happening, enhancing the team’s efficiency and delivering speed. Automated deployments also allow multi-environment stepped deployment pipelines, meaning that first the automation deploys to a lower critical environment, checks if it was successful and then carries on to the next environment. If something goes wrong with the deployment, the procedure stops itself, not impacting environments above in the hierarchy and can even be rolled back.

Automating deployment procedures has many advantages. The deployment will always be performed the same way without any drifts, checks are automatically done so there is no need for a developer to shadow the process. These advantages are key to amplifying the team’s ability to roll out features and improvements as efficiently as possible, reducing human errors and the mental drain of a stressful procedure like deployments.

Conclusion

Platform Engineering as a practice encompasses a wide range of topics and has a lot of impact in the lifecycle of a project. Having a team that can improve several aspects of the project development process is a must, particularly because it increases other teams efficiency and the quality of the developed product. As mentioned, a Platform Team can significantly improve the efficiency of different parts of the project like deployments, recurring processes and procedures as well as with standardisation of patterns, design decisions and documentation so that the development teams can produce in a consistent way that can be interpreted and understood by everyone, giving your project longevity and sturdiness.

In Ikigai, our Platform team has over 50 years of collective experience operating in multiple areas of expertise, particularly in banking. Our team consists of a group of exceptionally talented professionals that come from different backgrounds, giving the team great coverage of knowledge and complementing each other's skills. Our team has vast working experience with the latest industry standard technologies, building automated deployment processes for self service development teams with templated CI/CD pipelines and integrations with cloud providers, code scanning suites, observability utilities and other tools.

If you think that your project could benefit from a Platform Team or if you need an assessment of your project state, get in touch with our team through our contact form or through email. Looking forward to discussing your needs and devising a plan to make your team even more successful than it already is!