As I have many conversations about Platform Engineering, I can't help but compare it to when the DevOps Movement rolled in because some conversations give me a feeling of deja vu from that era. The public cloud was a catalyst for the DevOps movement - it abstracted the hardware layer with services on top, making it possible for a developer to code and deploy their application. But remember what people used to say?
"It's just someone else's computer."
Teams fought the concept, operations arguing that they could do better than public cloud providers and development claiming that their applications could not fit within the mold of public cloud services. Looking back now, we cringe at these arguments.
Remember the discussions on trying to calculate the value of DevOps methodology? Arguing that the equivalent hardware in the cloud was more expensive than holding it on-premise. Countless meetings were held trying to justify the head-to-head value of hardware resources. What did we learn? The value is not from the direct comparison; it's the enablement it created within teams - communication, speed of development, reduction of bugs, the ability to have an overview of the whole system, etc.
Other prevalent discussions were how the teams would look like, who would be responsible for what, and demands for graphs and diagrams on the future structure were thrown around, but at the end of the day, DevOps is about agility; it changes and grows as it needs. So, no matter what org chart was drawn up, it was far from reality and was only a mechanism to delay a movement growing everywhere.
Today, companies that still need to adopt the DevOps methodology struggle to get new hires, but worst of all, they struggle to be competitive in a rapidly developing environment. DevOps isn't just about technology, tools and structure. It's about providing real value to the business through increased efficiency, consistency, and more valued features to the customer.
In a competitive world, standing still is not an option. We must always strive to push past our current successes and embrace new and innovative ways to improve. This has been true in the past, when we disrupted traditional structures with DevOps, and it will be true in the future as we evolve and move into uncharted territory. Make no mistake, those who fail to look into platform engineering processes today will suffer the same fate as those who failed to look into DevOps five years ago.
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