Platform Engineering. The new DevOps

I confess: I don’t think that titles like “DevOps Engineer” make any sense. It’s like saying “wet water”. Do we want to have any other kind?

In my view, DevOps is a mentality with set of principles for all engineers, not just the ones working with platforms. But that dam was breached and we cannot go back, the flow of water is too strong and it is gaining more and more momentum.

So I guess we will have to live with “DevOps Engineers” in “DevOps teams” in “DevOps departments” in companies that “are now DevOps”.

It is not all lost though. We might have screwed the pooch with the terms, but I think that the resulting pattern of having platform teams is an important piece of having only “DevOps teams”. If done right, if…

In order for product teams in large companies to work in a DevOps way, they need great platforms that allow them to own their slice of product end-to-end. The platforms reduce complexity for deployment, monitoring, building and others so that product teams can handle these on their own using these platforms. They own their “pipelines”, their monitoring dashboards, their on-call alerts and so on and so forth and the platform teams makes sure the platforms are in tip-top shape and they are done in a way that ensure the product teams independence.

And that is an ideal worth fighting for!