Platform engineering is the industrialization of software development
A couple of weeks back I was planning the rollout of a platform engineering initiative with an enterprise team. As I normally do in these cases, I insisted they get a good sense of what their current status quo is in terms of developer experience, degree of automation, standardization, and security best practices.
Among other interesting things, it emerged that just to get a simple resource like a new database, developers had to wait on average 3 weeks and 17 manual steps with several handoffs between engineers, the I&O team, the security team (review, policy checks) and engineering managers were required almost every time. Crazy. Except it’s a very common story from the frontlines of DevOps setups at scale that I am sure many of you are familiar with.
And the main reason for the huge lack of automation and standardization at the root of these terribly inefficient workflows is the fact that most engineering orgs today still build software like small artisan shops.
