Platform Engineering Beyond CFEngine

Readers of a certain age and heritage will remember CFEngine, one of the early popular configuration management systems (still in use today!). It provides a powerful way for administrators to manage system configuration across heterogenous clusters of machines, and ushered in the age of automated configuration management, a key component of the modern technology ecosystem. I’ve worked with and managed teams responsible for cfengine infrastructure, and have seen first-hand the value and challenge of managing and operating these systems. But I have also seen the limitations of approaching platform engineering from this mindset.

Configuration management, infrastructure provisioning, and the orchestration thereof is a devilish problem for organizations. Significant innovation has been poured into this area, from advances in “Infrastructure as Code” offerings like terraform, to orchestration platforms like kubernetes. The problem of maintaining heterogenous environments, especially as these environments grow in dimensions of complexity (eg, all of the pieces that need to exist for you to deploy an application onto the cloud using a multitude of cloud services), is neverending. While we may have moved beyond cfengine, many modern platform engineering teams focus on this part of the stack, making it easy for application teams to select their appropriate archetype or blueprint to provision the cloud resources their application needs to run.

I happen to also think that this practice, particularly when it is the main focus of your platform team, is misguided. It comes from walking down a path that seems logical:

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