Shifting the focus to Platform Ops: Here’s why

What is Platform Ops?

Platform Ops emphasizes the importance of managing and optimizing the platform as a product and service to empower developer teams and improve operational efficiency.
Gartner defines Platform Ops as an approach to scaling DevOps that involves dedicating a team to the operation of a shared self-service platform.

Platform Ops aims to establish a centralized control plane across multiple clouds, enabling DevOps teams to easily provision, manage, and deploy any resource, regardless of location. It addresses the complexity of running, managing, monitoring, and troubleshooting service infrastructures to deliver reliable and adaptable applications.

Platform engineering involves designing, implementing, and managing toolchains, workflows, and infrastructure that help developers efficiently build and deploy applications. On the other hand, Platform Ops focuses on maintaining and operating these systems, providing operational services that allow development teams to self-serve.

Platform Ops teams act like internal operational services for your DevOps teams. They design, architect, maintain, interconnect, and secure self-service platforms on which software is executed with all the resources developers need to deliver applications. As a result, Platform Ops’ success depends on fostering a collaborative mindset through the implementation of an effective team structure.

Why do you need Platform Ops?

Platform Ops is essential for organizations that practice DevOps, especially at scale. As development teams and the number of applications grow, managing them all individually becomes difficult. Platform Ops creates a standardized platform that makes it possible to scale DevOps capabilities beyond a single team and, more importantly, provide process consistency and better governance.

At their core, successful Platform Ops strategies prioritize agility and scalability. As organizations grow, the ability to scale infrastructure becomes fundamental. Platform Ops enables scalability and leverages container orchestration tools to empower the organization to quickly adapt to evolving business demands. It streamlines the process of integrating new applications, adopting cutting-edge technologies, and dynamically scaling resources up or down to meet fluctuating needs.

By proactively monitoring the platform for potential issues and implementing best practices and standardized processes, Platform Ops ensures a stable and reliable environment. This assertive approach minimizes incidents, reduces downtime caused by unexpected glitches, and ultimately leads to a smoother user experience, thereby increasing customer satisfaction.

While self-service is a desirable goal in the cloud, concerns about uncontrolled costs, security vulnerabilities, and compliance hurdles can hinder its implementation. Platform Ops bridges this gap by providing a secure and standardized self-service environment. To ensure data security and data privacy, developers gain access to approved cloud resources and application tools, while restricted access prevents them from using anything that falls outside of organizational guidelines.

Platform Ops and DevOps: What’s the difference?

Spotting the difference between Platform Ops and DevOps teams can be difficult, as they often have similar goals.

While both contribute to successful software development in terms of quality, efficiency, and speed, Platform Ops is a scalable version of DevOps that provides operational services for development teams to reach their required level of self-service.

Platform Ops curates, maintains, and connects the platform that provides DevOps tools. To some, this means that Platform Ops could be a natural evolution of DevOps in terms of a more industrialized approach focusing on repeated and consistent outcomes. However, the difference is evident, for example, in scaling operations. As companies grow, the initial DevOps setup can struggle to handle increased loads or complex deployments. Here, Platform Ops steps in to scale the infrastructure, ensuring that DevOps can continue with minimal intervention.
 
 

Comparison of DevOps and Platform Ops

Let’s tackle some misconceptions

A common misconception is that Platform Ops could replace DevOps practices. However, it is important to remember that to create value for the end user, cooperation between three roles: experts, including those in agile, DevOps community, and software engineering, is important within Platform Engineering.

Furthermore, some have concerns about centralization and loss of developer autonomy. In reality, while Platform Ops involves a degree of centralization in terms of platform management and standardization, this can actually empower developers to focus on coding and innovation, self-serving their infrastructure needs.

Another misconception is the struggle to balance governance and flexibility. One of the key challenges in implementing Platform Ops is finding the right balance between imposing necessary governance to ensure security and compliance and offering flexibility to developers. Platform Ops achieves this by establishing golden paths, clear policies, and guidelines that outline what developers can and cannot do and offering modular services that developers can configure to customize standardized tools.

An example of the role of Platform Ops can be shown by creating a TVP (Thinnest Viable Platform) before scaling up operations. The TVP approach involves developing a minimal yet functional version of a platform that addresses a priority business case. This allows the team to deliver core business value quickly and efficiently. The framework here refers to the basic structure and features of this minimal platform, designed to meet essential needs without overcomplicating or overbuilding at the initial stage.

The achievement in this context comes from the collaborative efforts of various functional teams within an organization. These teams work together to both produce and utilize the data product created by the TVP. Through this process, they share insights, align on needs, and contribute to refining the platform. This cooperative approach not only speeds up the initial deployment but also ensures that the platform evolves in a way that is responsive to the actual requirements of different stakeholders. By focusing on essential features first and then expanding based on collective feedback and needs, Platform Ops helps build a more effective and sustainable platform.

This, in turn, allows maintainability. Considering that technologies evolve quickly, with a huge platform, it is easy to slack off. In the end, customer satisfaction comes from both the product’s functionality and maintainability, requiring continuous communication between company teams.