Platform Engineering and DevOps are two of the most important practices in modern software development. The acceptance of DevOps principles has prompted some of the industry’s biggest shifts over the past decade, but now the emerging concept of platform engineering is garnering more attention too.
In this article, we will explain the roles and responsibilities of DevOps and platform engineering. We’ll look in detail at the ways in which they differ, helping you find the best route towards optimizing your development and operations workflows. Let’s start by looking afresh at the importance of DevOps.
What we will cover:
DevOps is a software delivery method that removes the traditional gap between development and operations teams. By shortening the delivery lifecycle, it permits an increase in throughput while simultaneously promoting quality improvements.
DevOps practices overview
At its core, DevOps is a cultural movement that advocates improvements around developer autonomy, automation, and collaboration. Successful DevOps strategies typically utilize multiple tools and best practices to remove roadblocks from the development process:
- CI/CD pipelines save developer time and improve consistency.
- Repeatable test suites and automated security monitoring ensure issues are detected early in development.
- Developers can easily access live infrastructure to test scalability changes and investigate issues reported by operations teams.
This results in a more responsive development workflow that revolves around continuous improvement and close communication. But DevOps teams can struggle to implement these techniques in a way that delivers real value to devs — enter platform engineering.
Platform engineering is a tangible strategy for realizing DevOps outcomes. Platform teams design and create internal tools to support developers in attaining peak productivity.
The role of platform engineering
Whereas DevOps roles typically have a broad remit and can include many different responsibilities, platform engineers focus exclusively on the creation of Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs). These platforms are designed to act as the development team’s operational center, offering everything needed to deliver quality software on time:
- IDPs provide the mechanisms that enable self-service, on-demand access to infrastructure, such as by offering custom CLIs and web interfaces that let developers connect to the resources they need.
- Platforms include capabilities to help developers set up new environments and efficiently test their changes.
- When all developers use the IDP for their work, team leaders can continually and centrally enforce critical security and governance policies.
Hence, creating an IDP improves the developer experience and delivers consistency throughout the delivery lifecycle. This facilitates productivity increases and can give the business a competitive advantage by allowing it to launch new features quickly without affecting quality standards.
DevOps refers to concepts, methodologies, and best practices designed to enhance the software delivery experience, whereas platform engineering involves creating centralized Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) that provide essential tools and workflows for developers.
Platform engineering vs. DevOps: focus and purpose
Platform engineering focuses on building and maintaining internal platforms to streamline application development and deployment. In contrast, DevOps emphasizes integrating development and operations to enhance collaboration, automate workflows, and accelerate delivery cycles.
DevOps focus and purpose
- DevOps refers to concepts, methodologies, and best practices proven to improve the software delivery experience.
- DevOps focuses on automation, autonomy, and communication — necessitating solutions that can support modern workflows.
Platform Engineering focus and purpose
- Platform engineering focuses on building and maintaining the IDP, allowing developers to jump straight into their core work.
- The platform’s evolution is approached similarly to any other product, with developers treated as “customers.”
Platform engineering vs. DevOps: roles and responsibilities
Platform engineers are responsible for creating and managing scalable, reusable platforms while overseeing infrastructure, tooling, and developer experience. DevOps engineers bridge the gap between development and operations, managing CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and automation to ensure continuous and smooth delivery and deployment.
DevOps roles and responsibilities
- DevOps specialists create high-level processes that enhance collaboration between development and operations teams.
- DevOps responsibilities cover the entire software development lifecycle, including early stages like requirements planning.
Platform Engineering roles and responsibilities
- Platform engineering involves creating a dedicated team that builds developer tools using a platform-led approach.
- Platform teams are positioned closer to the infrastructure, working to create effective self-service tools that empower developers.
Platform engineering vs. DevOps: impact on developers
Platform engineering provides developers with stable, scalable, self-service platforms, reducing infrastructure management overhead. This allows developers to focus on writing code and developing features. DevOps fosters a culture of collaboration and shared responsibility, enabling developers to be more involved in deployment and operations, enhancing overall agility and responsiveness.
DevOps’ impact on developers
- CI/CD pipelines, test suites, and IaC are commonly found in a DevOps context but can be challenging for developers to utilize.
- Developers often lack the resources to develop DevOps processes themselves, as their primary role is to complete the development tasks that drive business value.
Platform engineering’s impact on developers
- Platform engineering aims to make life easier for developers by providing the necessary tools and workflows.
- The IDP lowers cognitive load, increases fulfillment, and allows developers more time for meaningful progress on new product features.
DevOps vs. platform engineering: key differences
The following table provides a breakdown of some of the main characteristics of DevOps and platform engineering:
| Component | DevOps | Platform Engineering |
| Purpose | Facilitate closer collaboration between development and operations to shorten the software delivery lifecycle | Build and maintain internal developer platforms (IDPs) |
| Team Formation | Everyone involved with software delivery contributes | A dedicated team with a specific remit to support other developers |
| Working Areas | Processes, collaboration, and culture | Infrastructure, tools, and technology |
| Mindset | Cultural; changes are made to achieve broad outcomes that affect everyone | Product; changes improve the experience of developers interacting with the platform |
| Audience | All internal stakeholders; customers, and external contractors may also be affected | Developers and operators directly involved in the delivery lifecycle |
| Effects on Software Delivery | Indirect effects experienced as cultural change | Direct action through the introduction of new tools and processes |
| SDLC Stages | Optimizations that shorten the loop between all stages, including planning, development, building, testing, deployment, operations, and monitoring | Mainly fulfilling the requirements of developers and operators from the build stage onwards |
Example of DevOps vs. platform engineering
Even if you’re familiar with the concepts, it can be difficult to distinguish between DevOps and platform engineering. Here are two scenarios designed to illustrate the difference:
1. DevOps: Example Inc. decides to shift its development workflows to emphasize good DevOps best practices
The organization sets up regular meetings between product leaders, developers, and operators, allowing shared requirements to be identified earlier on. Developers begin regularly liaising with operators to better anticipate how their work will perform in production. CI/CD pipelines are introduced to ensure all changes pass rigorous tests, but developers still have to switch between tools to check statuses and retrieve results.
Nonetheless, the tighter feedback loops and process consistency improvements enable a significant increase in deployment frequency without affecting the team’s change failure rate. All stakeholders feel better informed about the system’s state.
2. Platform engineering: Example Inc. creates an IDP that allows developers to run key tasks on demand
Although the business has seen positive results from its DevOps adoption, developers frequently cite tooling issues as a major productivity blocker. They struggle to test changes in new environments efficiently and cannot effectively diagnose production issues without waiting for the operations team to assist.
A platform engineering team is established to create a self-service hub that allows developers to request the access they require. Now, developers have a bespoke CLI and web dashboard that controls all aspects of the development process, including the ability to spin up new staging instances and perform limited interactions with the production deployment.
This initiative means developers are more productive and encounter less friction during their day. Simultaneously, the central internal platform guarantees that compliance standards are continually adhered to, satisfying the requirements of the security and business teams.
DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering roles frequently overlap, but each has a distinct purpose. DevOps focuses on integrating development and operations to enhance collaboration and automate workflows; SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) applies software engineering to infrastructure and operations problems to create scalable and reliable systems; Platform engineering builds internal platforms to streamline development and deployment.
- DevOps: DevOps engineers have a broad remit to implement optimizations that bring development and operations teams closer together. This includes process automation using techniques such as CI/CD, in addition to cultural improvements that aid communication and collaboration.
- SRE: Site reliability engineers focus on maintaining the reliability and scalability of production systems. They analyze the causes of failures and design improvements to prevent them from recurring.
- Platform engineering: Platform engineers build centralized internal platforms that give developers the tools they need to stay productive. They are specialized in creating the infrastructure that ensures development tasks succeed.
Platform engineering can be perceived as an approach to DevOps, whereas SRE is a separate discipline that handles reliability concerns. However, SRE teams will still work closely with their DevOps and platform engineering counterparts to ensure that infrastructure, processes, and development tools facilitate robust reliability.
Platform engineering is widely considered to be the next evolution of DevOps, building upon and enhancing DevOps principles rather than replacing them. It addresses common DevOps challenges by providing standardized, scalable platforms with integrated tools and services, simplifying the adoption and management of DevOps practices. Platform engineers focus on improving developer experience and productivity through self-service capabilities and automated infrastructure operations, effectively embodying the concept of DevOps-as-a-Service. Whereas DevOps focuses on the cultural and methodological approach to software development and IT operations, platform engineering creates a structured, service-oriented model that streamlines and optimizes DevOps processes.
Is platform engineering better than DevOps?
Platform engineering isn’t “better” than DevOps — it’s a pragmatic way of implementing effective DevOps procedures. Creating internal platforms allows all teams to converge around a common set of tools and practices, ensuring that the DevOps vision of consistent automated processes and clear communication is attained.
DevOps and platform engineering complement and build upon each other. The most successful software teams will cultivate a productive DevOps culture, with platform engineering as a key component.
How does platform engineering support DevOps?
Platform engineering is a strategy for putting DevOps into practice. Achieving a strong DevOps culture depends on the presence of sophisticated tools that allow devs and operations teams to carry out their work effectively. IDPs consolidate these tools into a centralized resource that’s readily accessible to everyone, backed by the dedicated support of the platform team.
The model solves everyday DevOps pain points through consolidation and standardization. Developers can launch environments, run tests, and check the progress of CI/CD pipelines without having to juggle multiple individual tools. The IDP helps everyone stay focused on meaningful work, reducing overheads and creating an environment where DevOps can flourish.
Many tools can help you get started with platform engineering and advanced DevOps. Here are some of the most popular platform engineering tools:
- Backstage — Originally developed at Spotify, Backstage is one of the best- known IDP frameworks. It allows you to create catalogs of services ready for developers to access.
- Qovery — Designed specifically to act as an IDP, Qovery simplifies the process of provisioning ephemeral environments with self-service developer access.
- Crossplane — A cloud-native control plane solution that allows you to orchestrate operations across apps and infrastructure, Crossplane lets you unify how you work with resources in different environments.
- Argo — The Argo family of projects simplifies operations around Kubernetes, including GitOps-driven continuous delivery using Argo CD and process automation with Argo Workflows.
- Spacelift — Spacelift is a sophisticated CI/CD platform for IaC, offering support for OpenTofu, Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Kubernetes, and Ansible. With Spacelift, you can ship infrastructure changes fast and enable safe self-service developer access.
These options are only a small slice of the platform engineering ecosystem. Interest in IDPs is growing rapidly, so new tools are regularly appearing.
How Spacelift can help your platform engineering?
Spacelift lets you manage Terraform — and other IaC — at scale by implementing robust CI/CD for your infrastructure that enables painless developer autonomy. Instead of running risky infrastructure changes in your regular CI/CD pipelines, Spacelift provides a dedicated platform that gives you clear visibility into your resources and lets you enforce precise governance guardrails.
Spacelift stacks encapsulate your source code, infrastructure state, and deployment configuration. Stacks can be queued, triggered, canceled, and inspected within the Spacelift UI, allowing you to check the health of your infrastructure at a glance.
You can use Spacelift as the foundation of your IDP by creating different stacks to fulfill your development functions. Other components, such as Blueprints, offer more options to simplify self-service provisioning operations. Developers can use the spacectl CLI to interact with available Spacelift resources, providing direct access to important tasks without having to leave the terminal.
DevOps tightly integrates development and operations tasks to produce a more responsive, automated, and continually improving software delivery cycle. But DevOps is merely a methodology that you’re responsible for putting into practice.
Platform engineering is a key way to realize DevOps objectives by creating automated internal platforms that position developer tools as products. Devs benefit from self-service access, repeatable IaC configuration, and dependable consistency. They can utilize the platform’s components to efficiently provision infrastructure and promote changes through the delivery process.
Ready to start building your platform? Check out Spacelift to configure CI/CD for your IaC. Spacelift automates infrastructure operations and enables effortless self-service developer access, giving you an IDP where everyone can work together. If you want to learn more about Spacelift, create a free account today or book a demo with one of our engineers.
The Most Flexible CI/CD Automation Tool
Spacelift is an alternative to using homegrown solutions on top of a generic CI. It helps overcome common state management issues and adds several must-have capabilities for infrastructure management.
