Platform Engineering
Key characteristics and the right approach:
Platform engineering significantly enhances organizational success by strategically measuring and improving software delivery capabilities. This approach should align closely with DORA's four core metrics which combines:
- User-centric design for development teams: which enhances „Lead Time for Changes“ by streamlining developer workflows, leading to faster innovation cycles.
- Optimized developer experience: which reduces „Change Failure Rate“ by minimizing errors through user-centric design and comprehensive tool support, improving software quality.
- Automated deployments and agile processes: which directly improves „Deployment Frequency“ by allowing more frequent releases with less effort, driving customer satisfaction through regular updates and quick feature rollout.
- Self-service tools and processes: which by empowering developers with better tools and autonomy, leading to fewer errors in production can directly reduce „Change Failure Rate” and improve “Lead Time for Changes“.
- Enhanced reliability and resilience: which improves both „Change Failure Rate” and “Time to Restore Service“ by minimizing downtime and speeding recovery processes. This stability is crucial for maintaining consistent service quality, thereby enhancing customer satisfaction and reducing lost revenue due to service interruptions.
- Cost-effective cloud integration: which supports all DORA metrics by enabling scalable and flexible infrastructure that can quickly adapt to changing demands. This agility allows for cost efficiencies through optimized resource use and the ability to scale in response to business growth or contraction.
- It makes dealing with the complexity of software development easier by using modern tools and technology, speeding up the creation of custom software.
- Ideal for tech-focused companies, especially those with many development teams or moving towards a more agile way of working.
- Envisions a development platform that evolves based on user feedback, managed to maximize business impact.
- Involves building a team of Platform Engineers who work on a feedback-informed development process.
- It offers a service-like solution to engineering teams, reducing workload and enhancing focus on value creation with efficient turnaround time.
Challenges and Innovations in the Modern IT World
Organizations aiming to build a competitive advantage with technology need to become experts in software delivery. Expertise in this area isn't just beneficial, it's a critical differentiator.
The landscape of software has evolved, becoming more complex with advanced tools, large amounts of data, machine learning, and GPT. Navigating this complexity is a formidable challenge of our times.
Development teams should concentrate on their core business domain while fostering innovative solutions. This dual focus is the key to maintaining a competitive edge.
Managing software delivery processes contributes significantly to the overall cognitive load on development teams. Streamlining these processes is essential to minimize stress and optimize performance.
Organizations face the challenge of delivering high-quality software quickly. Today’s market demands both, without compromise.
Over the past decade, the adoption of modern engineering methods such as AI-assisted tools like GPT copilot, ML Ops, and engineering-focused data analytics has led to a significant increase in the variety of workload types deployed in production environments.
Building an Internal Development Platform takes organizations from DevOps practices adoption to an internal product. Platform Team provides the solution as a service (SaaS) to internal customers – development teams. Besides technical skills Platform Engineering requires product management to achieve effectiveness and platform adoption by driving the platform development and SLAs.
Platform Engineering team exposes just enough technical details of the underlying infrastructure to reduce the cognitive load of development teams and ensure the proper level of reliability and maintenance.
At GFT, we integrate our software development expertise with a track record of creating secure cloud landing zones and developer platforms for a variety of clients. We understand the challenges of working in regulated sectors and apply our industry-specific knowledge to meet your needs effectively. Our skilled experts, equipped with right tools, can establish an independent platform or seamlessly extend your existing one, thereby boosting its throughput and introducing fresh and innovative ideas.
What did we do?
Risk analytics platform
We developed a risk analytics platform for a global investment bank. Building on top of enterprise-wide standards and with a focus on optimizing the developer experience, significantly reduced the production release process from 24 hours to 2 hours, while keeping all compliance standards and requirements.
The platform supports agile processes with ad-hoc releases multiple times a week, covering CI/CD, runtime platform, security scanning, and observability. It has strict quality gates, automates change management with one-click approvals, and includes a change risk assessment.
Investment fund support and sales platform
An investment bank, faced challenges with their investment fund support and sales platform due to its slow, ticket-based release process, involving multiple disconnected change management and IT Ops tools. To address these issues, the platform underwent a complete rebuilt, focused on enhancing the developer experience and achieving more frequent releases.
The introduction of automated, post-release steps for several hundred microservices reduced change lead time from weeks to minutes, with compliance requirements automated using a GitOps approach.
The platform's design encourages wide adoption, enables immediate response to business needs, and simplifies support by differentiating between unified platform support and application service experience support.
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