What is Platform Engineering - An Overview without Buzzwords

Platform Engineering is rapidly becoming a must-have approach for modern software teams looking to streamline operations, scale development efficiently, reduce cognitive load on developers while enhancing their productivity. But while the word is on everyone's lips, do we really know what it means? When it comes to middleware solutions, how can a platform engineering-based solution help users?

In this post, we’ll break it down:

• What platform engineering is

• What a platform engineering middleware solution looks like

• How platform engineering middleware helps teams ship faster, safer and smarter

What is Platform Engineering?

Search online and every page will tell you that Platform Engineering is all about building and maintaining unified, self-service technology platforms that align with DevOps, streamline and standardize the development, deployment and management of applications. But what does this definition really mean, in practice?

True platform engineering is deeply user-centric and, more specifically developer-oriented. Within an organization, adopting a platform engineering approach means that rather than having every development team reinventing the wheel and develop supporting technologies in house, e.g. runtimes, CI/CD pipelines, security, observability, etc., companies can use a standardized (often existing) toolkit that takes care of one or more of these aspects. This, in turn, helps developers focus on what they do best  (and enjoy the most): coding.

Typically, a solution developed according to the principles of platform engineering should help:

• Create standardized, pre-set golden paths that reduce choice paralysis and promote best practices
• Encapsulate infrastructure knowledge so teams don’t need to be experts in a multitude of fields and technologies
• Reduce friction across the entire software delivery lifecycle
• Offer a value-adding product, with service level agreements (SLAs), optimized user interfaces (UIs) and feedback loops

To support these elements, a platform must be be scalable, repeatable, secure by default and optimized for developer experience (DevEx).

So Does This Mean I Need to Buy or Develop a New Platform?

Not necessarily. The focus is implementing and assembling the right components in a way that makes developers’ lives easier, not harder. A well-designed platform engineering strategy often leads to consolidating tools, reducing shadow IT and driving down operational overhead. So you may purchase or create one new piece of software but simultaneously stop using a number of existing suites.

Many teams decide to build platforms internally, known as Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs), by leveraging existing infrastructure and tools. Many other organizations prefer to rely on available commercial tools, such as Application Platforms. To choose between these two options, it's important to consider your current resources and what can offer a quick return on investment (ROI).  

What's the Difference Between an Internal Developer Platform and an Application Platform?

Application platforms are ready-made environments for building and running apps, while IDPs are custom-built internal platforms that orchestrate, automate and unify the entire development and deployment process. Ultimately, IDPs and Application Platforms may perform the same functions, as they are well aligned. The main difference between them is the team that is behind their development:

• An Application Platform is something shipped to customers

• An IDP is developed in-house,  and it is not meant to be seen by end users

What is Platform Engineering in the Context of Middleware?

As we discussed above, platform engineering involves solutions that centralize tools, workflows and environments for development and operations. In the context of middleware, this means a platform engineering-oriented technology should handle the critical "glue" between applications, databases, and infrastructure, so developers can focus on building features and applications, rather than managing the underlying connections, configurations and their management.

How Platform Engineering Optimizes Middleware Management

Middleware is essential for connecting disparate systems and ensuring seamless data flow, but when deploying an application, especially to the cloud, configuration, scaling and monitoring can be time consuming, resource intensive and require expert skills. Platform engineering and a middleware solution based on its principles address these challenges by:

• Abstracting Complexity & Accelerating Deployments: Developers interact with middleware through unified APIs and self-service portals, shielding them from the intricacies of cloud configuration, integration, scaling and security
• Standardizing Application Deployment: Automated workflows and pre-configured setups allow middleware and cloud components to be provisioned, configured and updated in a consistent, repeatable manner across environments
• Enabling Observability and Monitoring: Integrated observability tools provide real-time insights into middleware and application performance, helping teams detect and resolve issues before they impact users
• Automating Scaling and Recovery: Middleware solutions based on platform engineering can automate scaling and failover management, ensuring high availability and reliability during peak demand or failures
• Enhancing Security and Compliance: Centralized management of application and middleware enforces consistent security policies, access controls and compliance checks across all services
  

Why Should I Use a Middleware Application Platform?

• Accelerating development, deployment and management, ultimately shortening time-to-market
• Simplifying operations and lowering barriers, so that even less experienced team members can successfully deliver business value faster
• Reducing cognitive load while enhancing developer productivity, leading to a more upbeat team
• Lowering costs while improving profitability

Platform Engineering At Payara Services

Learn more about Platform Engineering at Payara and how it can help your team - Download our latest guide here.

Payara is committed to delivering customer-centric application platforms and middleware technologies that rely on platform engineering excellence to support teams from initial development to production deployment. We apply the core principles of standardization, automation, self-service and security across our Payara Platform suite of enterprise Java solutions for the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC). 

More precisely, you can leverage:

As a result, Payara Platform users can simplify complex development workflows, reduce operational burdens and focus on business innovation rather than infrastructure management.