Simplifying application development with platform engineering as a service

Four key evolutions of application development

Developing and operating applications has turned into quite a labyrinth, largely owing to four key evolutions within the sector. These significant changes have transformed the way we develop, deploy, and maintain applications, requiring developers to deal with tasks that go beyond just writing application code:

1.    Deployment: From on-premise to (hybrid) cloud

Applications are increasingly migrating from on-premise deployments to cloud environments. This comes with many benefits, like improved flexibility, scalability, cost efficiency, and business continuity. However, application developers also need to deal with a much broader infrastructure.

2.    Architecture: From monolith to microservices

Gone are the days of the application monolith, one big software system that needs to be modified and deployed in its entirety. Today, cloud-native applications are divided into lightweight microservices, packaged in containers for independent operation. Reasons for this switch are improved developer productivity, increased flexibility and scalability, and better resilience. However, it also requires developers to become proficient in the technology stack and ecosystem of container technology i.e. Kubernetes..

3.    Methodology: From waterfall to DevSecOps

The waterfall methodology, with its linear and sequential approach to software development, is no longer deemed optimal for application development. Transitioning to a DevSecOps approach improves collaboration between different teams because it promotes constant interaction through shared goals and responsibilities and has shorter feedback loops. It also shortens the time to delivery due to the frequent, incremental changes that get tested and deployed quickly. However, it also requires the developers to learn a completely new set of development tools and practices, including CI/CD tools and GitOps. Moreover, in most DevSecOps environments, the traditional Ops tasks have become the responsibility of the Dev teams, who are not equipped for this and don’t have the controls in place to guarantee security, compliance, and application life cycle management.

4.    Security and observability: From wild west to regulated

Security and observability have often been an afterthought in application development, with little to no regulation guiding their implementation. However, as regulatory bodies increasingly come into play, organizations are transitioning to strict security principles and fine-grained observability for improved compliance. This makes security and observability responsibilities shared by all application developers.

As a result of these four key evolutions, you’ll need a whole platform and ecosystem of tools around your applications.

How to coop with complexity?

Although it’s useful to have skills that go beyond pure application development, we can’t expect every developer to be an expert in cloud infrastructure, containers, and security. Giving these responsibilities to developers can take time away from their primary role or lead to sloppy results.

Here are some of the pitfalls of this approach:

• The platform suffers from lack of updates as developers struggle to keep up with constant version upgrades.
• The platform gets fragmented as teams individually select their preferred tools instead of making collective choices.
• Basic capabilities like observability, backups, and security patching are reimplemented again and again.

In an infrastructure department, these problems would be detected automatically, as it has controls around security, patch management, and application life cycle management, as well as a dedicated team to keep systems running. The lack of these controls in a development department causes a lot of problems.

Establishing a platform engineering team

To combat these concerns, many organizations decide to establish a platform engineering team. This team is responsible for creating and maintaining a common platform equipped with all the tools and services needed by application developers, including:

• Infrastructure
• Container orchestration
• CI/CD
• Observability
• Security

These capabilities are provided on a self-service basis, through an Internal Development Platform (IDP), to ensure developers can access them as needed, thereby boosting productivity.

Gartner recognizes platform engineering as one of the top strategic technology trends for 2024. The firm predicts that, by 2026, 80% of large software engineering organizations will have in-house platform engineering teams to assist application delivery, an increase from 45% in 2022.

Advantages for the enterprise architect and CIO

Having a platform engineering team presents some distinct advantages. The team assures a consistent and scalable way for delivering reliable and secure solutions, offering tools and best practices to manage complexity and stimulate innovation in IT architectures.

Enterprise architects can leverage platform engineering to create reusable and adaptable solutions across the organization. Various application teams within the organization can rely on a standardized and consistent way of developing, testing, deploying, and operating applications. Having a platform engineering team taking care of all these aspects reduces the complexity and costs associated with managing many platforms, tools, and technologies.

For CIOs (IT managers), the advantage of an effective platform engineering team is its emphasis on reliability and monitoring. Capitalizing on the team’s best practices, governance, and standards, CIOs can improve the reliability of software delivery. With proactive detection and resolution of incidents through monitoring, coupled with a robust release and patch management process to fix vulnerabilities, the overall platform security is given a real boost. As such, the platform engineering team establishes a solid base that can scale horizontally, accommodating increased workloads and new projects with minimal downtime and disruptions.

Introducing platform engineering as a service

Assembling a platform engineering team is no simple task, primarily due to the challenge of finding the right profiles with the required knowledge needed for building and maintaining a platform. As a single person typically doesn’t have this vast knowledge, the platform engineering team needs subject matter experts in various domains, such as infrastructure, networking, containerization and cloud native tooling. And to prevent problems when one of these experts gets sick or leaves the organization, the team needs multiple experts for the same domain. This results in a large team, which isn’t cost efficient.

Furthermore, learning these skills on the job is a tough ask. Our experience with infrastructure and application development shows that building this kind of platform takes on average two to four years once the team has acquired the right skills. This is precious time in a fast-moving world.

This is where KubePort comes in. With this solution, we provide platform engineering as a service. KubePort allows you to concentrate on your application’s development without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure, container platform, or cloud-native tooling. With KubePort, you’re using a service maintained by our platform engineering team, ensuring a stable, consistent, and managed infrastructure you can build on. As we have standardized and automated the platform and offer it as a service, KubePort does not require a large upfront investment in terms of setup.

Click here if you want to learn more about KubePort.