Introduction

During the Kubernetes Community Days (KCD) in Munich, Camptocamp hosted a booth during the conference. This event also provided opportunities to see some great presentations and workshops on security, monitoring, network, and CICD.

One particular focus was given to the Platform Engineering concept. The term might not be new, but it is gaining traction. Back in the days, when it was first coined, the need for a new term was probably questionable. And the overlap with some already existing definitions such as Software engineering or Site Reliability engineering could have brought some confusion.

Through several presentations given from different actors (industry, service provider and software vendor), the conference shed new light on the topic of Platform Engineering. Instead of trying to give a definition of what it is, let’s try to summarize some of the subjects that were addressed.

Keep track of the user needs

Stéphane Di Cesare presented ongoing works in DKB to give the control back to the user with a focus on values. As the first result, values of a service are grouped into sets called capabilities. This approach aims at capitalizing development effort (e.g.: documentation) and to reduce cognitive loads by managing complexity of the platform regarding security and compliance.

Identify industry patterns

Another presentation was performed by Daniel Bodky. He introduced the Cloud Native Operational Excellence (CNOE, pronounced "Kanoué") as a framework whose primary focus is to standardize infrastructure.

In order to achieve this goal, stakeholders are divided into different categories. And on the other end, the platform is also divided into building blocks called technology capabilities. Capabilities may not fit the needs of every user, and CNOE introduced these layers to help companies of different sizes to improve their decision making in the CNCF technological landscape and to improve the Devops experience with open source solutions.

As an example of a result, he showcases the tool idpBuilder. The utility can build a complete environment based on Argocd, Gitea, Backstage, Keycloak, CrossPlane, external Secrets operator. The stack can run on a local machine, and the demo illustrated a templating approach with Backstage to create a catalog of new infrastructure services for the end user.

Idpbuilder create

Function as a Service

Mauricio Salatino and Thomas Vitale highlighted during their presentation the separation of concerns. By combining technologies in the field of FaaS (Function as a Service), such as Knative and Dapr, they demonstrated an example of development based on serverless infrastructure. The goal is to faster onboarding of application developers and decrease the load in a distributed environment context. Dapr enforces best practices for development and manage ready to use function in the following area:

From project to product

David Sterz, Stefan Schweer and Tim Schrumpf shared how Vorwerk planned to consolidate more than 10 years of technical changes of their infrastructure by adopting a platform-focused approach. The platform initially started on-premise with a European scope and went progressively worldwide and on the cloud to reach out millions of end-users. The needs of the platform also grow with different concerns relating to security or finops. The introduction of a platform as a product and not as a project is a paradigm shift to better handle platform maturity and future evolution and needs.

Conclusion

This post was not intended to give an exhaustive list of what was discussed on Platform Engineering, but rather to highlight some chunks that are part of it: create value for the user, reusable capabilities, tools and methods, platform evolution and maturity. All these lead to a better integrations of works. And from that perspective, the platform engineering concept might be seen as an additional effort to improve the continuum in different product life cycle development phase.

Some references

Presentation titles during the conference

• Platform Engineering: DevOps Evolution or a Fancy Rename? by Dotan Horovits
• Introducing a product mindset in a container platform team by Stéphane Di Cesare
• Towards Standardized Platforms: How the CNOE Project can Help? by Daniel Bodky
• Saturating people not systems: Lessons learned from building a platform to serve dishes worldwide David Sterz / Stefan Schweer / Tim Schrumpf
• Unlocking New Platform Experiences with Open Interfaces by Mauricio Salatino and Thomas Vitale

Other references

• Blog post form Dotan Horovits, Platform Engineering: DevOps evolution or a fancy rename?
• CNCF Platform white papers
• dapr.io project
• Cloud Native Operational Excellence (CNOE)