As the global digitalization process accelerates, enterprises use cutting-edge technologies to accelerate business innovation and improve competitiveness. Among them, how to speed up development efficiency and create more value for customers has become a new focus of attention.
After DevOps, the term "Platform Engineering" (Platform Engineering) sparked heated discussions. Platform engineering is a set of mechanisms and architectures for building and operating a self-service internal developer platform that supports software delivery and lifecycle management, with the goal of optimizing the developer experience and accelerating the speed at which product teams create value for customers. According to Gartner, by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will have established platform teams, 75% of which will include developer self-service portals.
Is Platform Engineering an Alternative to DevOps? What can platform engineering bring us? Recently, at the VMware Tanzu media communication meeting, Deng Huijun, General Manager of VMware Tanzu (Business) Greater China, and Jun Gang, Technical Director of VMware Modern Application Division, explained in detail the value of "platform engineering" and the layout of VMware in platform engineering.
1. What is platform engineering?
Review the software development process and go through three stages from waterfall development to agile development to DevOps. Since the 1970s, the software development process has adopted waterfall development, which is carried out in the order of requirements analysis, architecture design, coding, testing and maintenance. With the passage of time and the development of technology, people's product iteration speed is getting higher and higher, the software development cycle is getting shorter and shorter, and waterfall development has become outdated.
Around 2000, agile development began to enter the stage of history, effectively improving the speed of demand launch, and obtaining user feedback for rapid product iteration.
In 2008, the term DevOps was born. Its appearance broke the barriers between development and operation and maintenance personnel. Development and operation and maintenance are no longer isolated, and the two collaborate and communicate within the software life cycle. DevOps is to help enterprises integrate operation and maintenance and development, and platform engineering provides an "internal development platform" for enterprise software development teams through tools and processes, covering all operational requirements of the application life cycle. The ultimate goal is to create a frictionless self-service experience that empowers users with the right capabilities to get important work done at the least cost, increasing end-user productivity and reducing their cognitive load.
2. VMware's understanding of platform engineering
In Deng Huijun's view, platform engineering is not a substitute for DevOps, but an extension and supplement, similar to "DevOps 2.0" . She believes that platform engineering has the following functions: first, platform engineering establishes a unified and sustainable solution, not a single solution; second, it can continuously reuse code and tools for application development; third, it is more secure .
Jun Gang added that from the perspective of VMware, platform engineering is a very large system that involves all aspects of IT system construction, such as platforms, applications, management, and developer efficiency.
Before the concept of platform engineering was proposed, VMware has been helping to improve developer efficiency and has done a lot of work. From VMware's point of view, platform engineering covers the following three layers to solve the problem of rapid delivery by IT personnel, improve the efficiency of developers, and help the realization of business requirements from generation to rapid launch and rapid landing.
The bottom layer is the infrastructure, covering container, computing, network, storage and other technologies, including Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, Tanzu Mission Control, etc. At the same time, it adopts Aria's complete set of enterprise-level data center and cloud environment management tools to realize the supervision and control of the overall infrastructure. . Provide resources for development and operation and maintenance teams in an efficient, effective, and safe manner.
The middle is the application platform layer, which is divided into two parts. One is the traditional PaaS technology, such as CI/CD process, mirror library, log analysis, multi-tenancy, service directory management, micro-service framework, etc.; the other is the IDP developer platform, integrating IDE Generate, apply scaffolding and other tools to improve developer efficiency. Last year, VMware officially released the Tanzu Application Platform, creating a simplified end-to-end development and operation experience path for development, application security, and application operation and maintenance teams to improve software development efficiency, strengthen application security, and simplify application operation and maintenance complexity , to speed up the application iteration time.
The top layer is management practices, covering the division of labor and roles of platform teams, platform-as-product management methods, etc. VMware has set up Tanzu Labs Services laboratory, which is a professional service team oriented to application modernization, condensing new management methods and engineering practices of many platform projects, and providing more in-depth services for enterprises.
3. Application of VMware in platform engineering
For example, a bank has done a lot of DevOps deployments in the past, but because each department is making its own tools, the connectivity and connection between tools have not been fully considered, forming isolated islands one by one, and the implementation effect is not particularly ideal. In addition, the CI/CD process is developed by different teams. The entire team lacks a complete control diagram, and only sees non-stage reports without a complete diagram. If there is a problem after the application is launched, you can only troubleshoot the problem step by step in different systems.
As an end-to-end integrated platform solution, Tanzu Application Platform helps enterprises build and deploy more software faster and more securely through a rich set of development tools and pre-laid production paths. Through the Tanzu application platform, the bank can solve the problem of diagramming the whole process from source code to online, and can also embed self-developed tools into the process to effectively improve efficiency. Once a problem occurs, it can also be quickly located.