How to Become a Platform Engineer
With community events like PlatformCon tripling in size in just a few years, industry studies reporting that platform engineers can earn 42.5% more than DevOps, not to mention the growing landscape of new industry certifications, it’s no surprise that platform engineering is one of the hottest IT careers today.
The question is: What exactly does it mean to be a platform engineer, and how do you become one?
What is a Platform Engineer?
Platform engineering is the discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations in the cloud native era. Platform engineers provide an integrated product most often called an internal developer platform (IDP) covering the operational necessities of an application’s entire lifecycle.
A reference architecture of an example IDP on AWS.
Platform engineers build and run the IDP to provide golden paths and enable developer self-service. The IDP consists of many different technologies and tools that operate across five planes: developer control plane, integration and delivery plane, monitoring and logging plane, security plane and resource plane. The tools include things such as Spotify’s Backstage, Argo CD and a platform orchestrator like Humanitec that are glued together in a way that lowers cognitive load on developers without abstracting away context and underlying technologies.
How Do You Become a Platform Engineer?
Whether you are at the beginning of your engineering journey or are a senior DevOps engineer or site reliability engineer (SRE) looking to advance your career, it is crucial to understand that platform engineering is not just a technical shift — primarily, it is a mindset shift.
Over the last few years, I have seen dozens of platform teams fail. Why? Often it’s because ops and infrastructure folks are just reflagged as a platform team, and although they have the best intentions, what they build doesn’t actually serve developers. Instead, they build platforms that solve their ops problems, not developers’ issues.
One of the most important elements of platform engineering is shifting toward a product mindset and treating your platform as a product. Platform engineers must build and maintain a product for their customers, the developers. Whether the product is for internal customers (their developers) rather than external ones, the principles that make product management successful are the same principles that drive the best platform teams.
A platform engineer must also understand the technical foundations and principles of cloud computing, infrastructure as code, container orchestration and more, as well as have an extensive knowledge of their company’s tooling). However, the most important elements that distinguish a platform engineer from the pack are using product management principles and following best practices.
If you want to be a successful platform engineer, ask yourself the following questions:
- How will you do user research to deliver something that solves real pain points?
- How do you define golden paths that developers will love, so as to help ensure a high adoption rate for your platform?
- How do you find the right level of abstraction that lowers cognitive load for developers without removing all the context?
- How will you market the platform to all relevant stakeholders? How will you organize stakeholder buy-in to gain funding for your platform engineering initiative?
- Will you start with a minimum viable platform (MVP)? Or plan a really large initiative to cover all eventualities, even though it will probably take years to build?
Ops professionals rarely ask themselves these types of questions, and it’s easy to get lost. But becoming a platform engineer isn’t as easy as simply changing your job title on LinkedIn. Fortunately, there are a lot of resources available to make answering these questions easier.
Want to Become a Platform Engineer?
Two key resources are the incredible growth of the platform engineering community and the community’s primary event, PlatformCon, which has gotten larger every year. Combined with the rise of online resources designed to help, it is easier than ever to become a platform engineer.
As platform engineering continues to grow and more enterprises jump on board, it is clear that there is no better time to start learning how to become one.
Check out the platform engineering community, and join the waiting list to get started on your platform journey.
