Platform engineering vs devops

Hey folks,

I really like platform engineering as a term, especially when compared to devops. So much of software delivery comes down to “how are we accurately describing what we're doing?"

Devops has been co-opted to be 50,000 things. Nobody knows what it means. Everybody has their own definition!

That is what's difficult about the term devops.

Ask ten engineers "what is devops?". They'll each have their own answer. It's a mess.

• "well, devops is a culture"

• "no devops is a job title"

• "no you're doing ops but you're also developing application code"

Now I don't think you need to entirely kick devops to the curb as a term if you have a strong definition of it at your organization or for yourself or your team. But know that outside your organization, devops means many things to many people.

Platform engineering brings clarity.

You have engineers who are building the platform that your software runs on. “Platform” is the critical word that holds it together and makes the idea makes sense.

It makes sense to me and it seems to makes sense to other people. That's why I'm a big fan of the term platform engineering.

I like that people are focused on treating the platform as a product. The developer experience for application engineers is critical; they're the people that the platform team is serving. Fundamentally, the goal of the platform is to make their lives easier.

That's always been my goal ever since I started to focus more on IaC and platforms. I used to be an application engineer and I wrote lots of typescript and ruby. Then I transitioned towards terraform and AWS.

When I made that switch, I loved having application engineers as my users. Making them happy is awesome!

That's what platform engineering is to me. Those application engineers are our users. We're trying to serve them. We should ask them questions. We should make sure that they're happy with the thing that we're delivering.

The platform is the product; the application engineers are the customers.

May your terms always be well defined,

Matt @ Masterpoint

PS Do you know I help organize the Front Range Platform Engineering meetup? It’s a group of cloud-native enthusiasts with talks on a range of topics around platform engineering. If you’re in the Denver, Colorado, USA area, learn more or join us.