Amnic’s monthly newsletter Building Blocks captures major news and trends in the developer community.
This month’s newsletter focuses on how Platform Engineering improves the developer experience and why GitOps has become the most powerful thing in the DevOps universe. Plus, some recommendations for the weekend and Meme-ops. At 722 words, this newsletter is a 4-minute read.
Happy reading!
IN FOCUS
Is Platform engineering the new DevOps or SRE?
Is Platform engineering the next stage in the evolution of DevOps? Like DevOps, it enables developer self-service; like SRE, it reduces errors and increases reliability.
Sid Palas, Engineer with DevOps Directives LLC, describes platform engineering arising out of two core concepts:
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Developers do not like dealing with infrastructure.
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Companies need control of their infrastructure as they grow.
Palas states that DevOps principles apply to platform engineering – but the chief goal of platform engineering is to provide control over the infrastructure while enabling software engineers to remain within the Developer’s Comfort Zone.
Developers should be able to deploy and run their apps and services end-to-end, which refers to true DevOps – You build it, you run it. While this works for progressive organizations like Google or Amazon, but has been unrealistic for most companies leading to anti-patterns where the value of Ops seems to shrink as a single Dev team manages it with other priorities. The solution to this problem is setting up an Internal Developer platform (IDP) which picks the right level of abstraction to run their apps and services.
Luca Galante, Product Owner with Humanitec, explains the origins of platform engineering and the role of Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) in helping organizations ensure a smooth self-service workflow from code to production.
Platform engineering’s growing adoption isn’t just some flight of fancy. From powering Nike and Starbucks projects that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise to serving as the foundation of GitHub’s now-legendary infrastructure growth, IDPs are behind some truly inspiring tales of how to thrive at scale.
DevOps, SRE, and Platform engineering all share a desire to deliver high-quality software with ease and at a faster pace. When the platform team aligns with the engineering and company goals, it can incorporate a healthy DevOps and SRE culture that enhances the developer experience and builds new infrastructure for future features or projects.
GitOps for Continuous Deployment
As per the DevOps Research and Assessment 2021 State of DevOps study, high-performing DevOps teams have more frequent deployments, shorter change lead times, a faster MTTR (mean time to recovery), and a very low change failure rate. According to Steve George, Chief Operations Officer at Weaveworks, the popularity of GitOps is due to the desire for speedier application deployment cycles. As a result, many businesses are expressing interest in using GitOps in 2022.
GitOps is about managing application and infrastructure configurations using Git as a single source of truth. It leverages the benefits of Git while interacting with anything from code to the cloud.
GitOps provides an operating model on how to implement a software delivery pipeline. However, it is crucial to implement GitOps with a well-defined implementation strategy – as described by Chris Myers. He suggests users can make informed decisions when implementing GitOps to a delivery pipeline by focusing on factors like pipeline strategy and the tool stack rather than chasing trends or blindly diving into GitOps. These decisions can then be translated into an overarching implementation and maintenance strategy to implement GitOps as part of your delivery pipeline.
RECOMMENDATIONS
AWS re: Invent 2022
It’s time to gear up for AWS re: Invent 2022, the most transformative event in tech. Join the global cloud community in Las Vegas, Nevada, from Nov 28 – Dec 2, 2022, to meet, get inspired, and rethink what’s possible. If you plan to drop by, do catch up with Sathya Nagarajan, CTO and Co-Founder of Amnic.
Why streaming Microservices are the future of OTT?
Consumers these days are adopting over-the-top (OTT) as their primary mode for watching content. to accommodate this demand streaming Product Developers and Operation Engineers understand the need for the cloud and migrate the streaming stack to a microservices architecture. You can read more about this in the article here.
Drawing the line between Platform and Product
Are you wondering where you should draw a line between platform and product and what should be the role of a platform engineer – this podcast may offer you some insights. Ben Cordero from Synk DevOps Paradox – an experienced SRE with a long track record of building and testing systems shares his experience as a Platform engineer and provides key highlights on building and running platforms.
MEME-OPS
Credit: Posted by @memenetes