Platform engineering is about enhancing the software development lifecycle (SDLC), improving the developer experience, and reducing cognitive load by building an internal developer platform. Such a process typically requires platform engineering teams to extend traditional essential DevOps components—like container orchestrators, CI/CD elements, and monitoring platforms—with newer categories of tools, like internal developer portals, ephemeral environments, and PaaS implementations.
In this article, we explore the main concepts underlying platform engineering tools. We start with reviewing the platform engineering landscape. Then we explain the difference between internal developer platforms and internal developer portals. We also review how ephemeral environments reduce toil for developers and explain how platform as a service (PaaS) can simplify the entire platform engineering adoption process.
These days, companies strive to carefully choose and assemble the perfect set of tools and solutions to cater to their developers’ requirements. This process becomes challenging with the constant arrival of new tools in the field each month.
The overarching goal of platform engineering is to boost developer productivity by improving the developer experience (DevEx). It does this by constructing internal developer platforms that reduce cognitive load, repetitive work, and developer toil.
Platform engineering provides layered abstractions tailored to organizational needs, helping developers navigate these complexities more effectively. It focuses on facilitating software building and delivery without overly simplifying the unique capabilities of underlying core services. By treating platforms as products, platform engineering teams design these platforms for easy, self-service consumption by developers.
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The platform engineering community curates a list of tools and differentiates them into several categories according to the distinct function to be handled.
Let’s break down the key categories in the platform engineering tools landscape that are essential for streamlining and securing your development workflow:
The platform engineering landscape offers a variety of tools, yet selecting the ideal combination tailored to an organization’s specific needs is complex. Engineers need a thorough understanding of these tools to navigate this landscape effectively. By concentrating on the particular needs of developers throughout this selection process, you can ensure that the tools chosen are perfectly aligned with their requirements.
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Integrating the tools presented in the developer control plane with the delivery pipeline (i.e the integration and delivery plane) can significantly reduce cognitive load and enhance self-service capabilities for developers. In the industry, this is commonly referred to as designing an internal developer platform (IDP).
An IDP facilitates the full application lifecycle management process, enabling developers to autonomously develop, deploy, and maintain applications. Originating as a solution to the inefficiencies caused by dependencies on IT and DevOps teams, IDPs offer a wide range of tools and services that enhance efficiency and productivity. They simplify complex cloud infrastructure, providing developers with a streamlined and powerful interface that offers more control and flexibility than traditional platform-as-a-service (PaaS) models.
These platforms significantly accelerate the software development lifecycle, allowing for faster product iterations and improved efficiency. For example, leading tech companies like Salesforce and Microsoft Azure utilize robust IDPs that streamline environment setup, collaboration, and application deployment. Through features like containerization, automatic scaling, and CI/CD, developers can focus more on coding and less on infrastructure management, thereby accelerating the development process and reducing time to market.
Here are some popular examples of IDPs:
One of the key elements of the IDP is a category of tools called developer portals, sometimes referred to as internal developer portals, which creates some confusion due to the similar abbreviations. Let’s see how they differ.
An internal developer portal acts as a centralized hub, offering resources, documentation, and APIs to streamline and support the software development process. By providing a single access point for collaboration and information retrieval, such portals enhance productivity and encourage knowledge sharing among developers. These tools include essential elements like coding standards, architectural guidelines, API flow diagrams, and best practices, ensuring consistency and high-quality output across projects.
Companies like Google and Amazon leverage internal developer portals to equip their teams with the tools and information necessary for crafting superior solutions. These portals facilitate interactive learning and community engagement through features like API documentation, code samples, and forums. Additionally, the integration of these portals with various development tools and services, including version control, issue tracking, and project management systems, optimizes the workflow and supports developers through all stages of the software development lifecycle.
Backstage, developed by Spotify, is believed to be the very first developer portal on the market. Spotify built it internally to fulfill its popular “Spotify Model,” which involves having small “squads” of engineers (around 7-10 people) who own projects end to end. Developer portals and service catalogs help teams maintain their independence while enforcing standardization and ease of discovery.
Backstage includes features like these:
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As we’ve streamlined tools and documentation access through internal developer platforms and portals, managing the actual environments where developers work has become the next big challenge. Essentially, we need solutions that allow environments to be as dynamic as the development process itself. Ephemeral environments are key to this, as they can be quickly set up and taken down, greatly enhancing flexibility and reducing overhead in development workflows.
Ephemeral environments mimic production settings, allowing developers and testers to operate in isolated and controlled conditions. The major advantages of ephemeral environments include drastically reduced setup and teardown times, faster development and testing cycles, and optimizing resource usage by existing only as long as necessary.
Organizations without dedicated and experienced DevOps teams may find the complexity of setting up and maintaining ephemeral environments challenging. A practical solution is to opt for an environment-as-a-service vendor. These vendors manage the most complex aspects of establishing ephemeral environments, significantly saving time and effort for a modest fee. This arrangement allows development teams to focus on business-critical tasks rather than on infrastructure and configuration issues.
Some of the key features that can be expected from an EaaS solution are the following:
Coherence offers an ephemeral-environments-as-a-service solution that greatly simplifies the steps required to create ephemeral or preview environments by using preset integrations and automation. In a broader context, Coherence serves as a developer platform as a service (PaaS) provider; we will discuss how this differs from classical PaaS offerings in the next section.
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While internal developer platforms, developer portals, and ephemeral environments optimize development processes, implementing and maintaining these systems demands significant resources. Major companies like Google, Microsoft, and Spotify have dedicated entire departments to managing these complexities. However, smaller organizations or earlier-stage startups may find establishing such systems impractical despite their potential benefits.
This is where the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) concept becomes crucial, offering smaller teams access to managed development environments without the overhead of building and maintaining them in-house. PaaS provides the necessary tools and infrastructure support, allowing even small teams to scale efficiently and focus on innovation. Heroku pioneered the PaaS category, setting a standard for modern platforms like Vercel, Render, Railway, Replit, platform.sh, Aptible, and Northflank, among others.
PaaS products offer a seamless developer experience by simplifying the initial setup, minimizing maintenance, and covering common use cases comprehensively. Developers can easily connect databases and integrate services like DataDog into applications without complex configurations, with deployment and hosting solutions built into the PaaS that include CI/CD processes. This integration facilitates a streamlined workflow, allowing developers to focus more on coding and less on infrastructure management.
Additionally, PaaS environments are supported by robust communities and extensive documentation, making it easier for developers to find solutions to common issues—a contrast to the varied approaches possible with virtual machines. Starter templates are readily available for popular frameworks, enabling quick project initiation and customization. Economically, PaaS offers cost-effective starting options—often free—with scalable solutions that can be financially considered as the project grows, allowing businesses to concentrate on their core functions and value to users rather than on infrastructure management.
There are three primary reasons why organizations outgrow PaaS offerings:
For small teams, side projects, personal or student use, or other use cases where simplicity is paramount, a traditional PaaS is the right hosting and deployment choice. For organizations, this is a great place to get started but not the final destination. Coherence provides a ready-to-use developer platform as a service on its own cloud, combining the best features of both environments. Additionally, Coherence can function as a PaaS within your cloud by utilizing the built-in reference architectures of CNC.
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Platform engineering represents a strategic enhancement of the software development lifecycle, focusing on improving the developer experience and minimizing cognitive load through sophisticated tool integrations. In this article, we reviewed the platform engineering tools landscape and their distinct categories. We contrasted internal developer platforms with internal developer portals. Finally, we highlighted the efficiency gains from ephemeral environments and the simplification offered by PaaS products.
