Beyond Platform Engineering: The Rise of Platform Democracy
Since first appearing on the IT radar around 2015, platform engineering continues to bring revolutionary and evolutionary changes in how software is built by developers.
Under platform engineering, IT systems administrators are tasked with choosing and assembling proven, curated and regularly maintained development applications that are gathered together and then delivered to a company’s developers through an all-in-one self-service portal. Its promise is clear — by providing a portal where developers can log in and just get to work, they are freed up from having to spend valuable time manually searching for and maintaining their application tools, as they did in the past.
And platform engineering is a much better option for most companies and developers than the DevOps processes that were all the rage a few years ago, experts argue, since DevOps does not adequately scale for use in companies with more than 50 developers.
But some aspects of platform engineering have not made all developers happy or feel like they are part of the application selection process. Developers typically have very individual preferences for using certain tools and applications, and that can conflict when platforms are created and curated by systems administrators who provide only certain approved coding tools and applications.
Amid this crossroads, talk began in the world of developers about making platform engineering a more democratic process to give them more choice and freedom and a say in how they would use it inside their companies.
The platform democracy discussion — or perhaps we should call it a movement — continues to garner attention and discussion around the industry wherever platform engineers and developers are working together to build applications.
“The idea of platform democracy is that you expose all of your platform services to developers so they can self-serve,” Daniel Bryant, the head of product marketing for platform engineering vendor Syntasso, told The New Stack. “But then you enable all the producers in your organization to [reconfigure and modify] the platform to fit their individual needs so developers and all the infrastructure folks, the security folks, the billing folks can provide these services for your developers to get stuff done,” he said.
That is where democracy comes in, said Bryant. “That is it in a nutshell — platform democracy. There are a few folks flinging that term around and we are jumping on it as well. It is really about that there is no one-size-fits-all for a platform or for an organization.”
Instead, even after adopting a platform engineering platform or building one, companies and developers can discover that it may only cover about 80% of their workload needs, said Bryant. “You are always needing to do a little bit of something different for your specific requirements.”
Syntasso’s CEO, Colin Humphreys, wrote about this conundrum in a recent post on the company’s blog.
“What if we moved beyond the idea of strict ownership and control?” wrote Humphreys. “What if everyone could participate in shaping the platform — not just a central team? Imagine if internal platforms worked in multiplayer mode [where developers and other users would each have a say in the platform’s tools and capabilities], where the production and consumption of platform capabilities were democratized.”
Under a model of platform democracy, “developers, security teams, SREs, and even external service providers collaborate seamlessly, instead of waiting on a central platform team to deliver everything,” wrote Humphreys. “As platform engineering matures, the organizations that succeed won’t be the ones that rely on centralized, bottlenecked teams. Instead, they’ll be the ones that embrace platform democracy, enabling developers, platform engineers, security teams, and even external providers to participate in building and maintaining internal platforms.”
A Shift From Platform Engineering Centralization to Decentralization
Product manager Bryant said that Humphreys’ views on the topic guide the company on platform democracy today.
“It is an evolution to swing the pendulum from centralizing [applications and tools under platform engineering] to decentralizing responsibilities of the platform” under platform democracy, said Bryant. Under platform engineering, it is “the platform, my way or the highway. And now I am arguing that platform democracy is going to swing it back towards not only developers but to security folks, observability teams, compliance teams, and billing teams so they can contribute, too.”
Ultimately, platform democracy will bring maturity to platform engineering, which began when IT managers created it, said Bryant. “And so, this idea is ‘let us find a way for everyone to talk and find ways of working better together,’ because it will help the whole company, the individual developers, and the IT team.”
One of the true strengths of platform democracy, he added, is that it gives a true say to the developers who have to work under it. “Now we are looking at it and saying, ‘we want to get your input, too, and that while we cannot guarantee you are going to get what you want, we are getting your input.’”
Syntasso Customer NatWest Discusses Its Platform Democracy Efforts
One Syntasso customer that is already embracing and exploring platform democracy is Edinburgh, Scotland-based NatWest, (National Westminster Bank), which has been using the Syntasso Kratix Enterprise platform engineering platform for its developers for several years.
Chris Plank, an enterprise architect, product owner, and platform as a product evangelist for NatWest, said that the bank is working to offer a consistent development environment for its developers to use quickly to reduce demanding cognitive workloads.
In the past, before adopting platform engineering, NatWest developers used less flexible and effective DevOps to get their projects completed, he said. “They would have tried to do build, run, and support for themselves,” said Plank. “They were trying to do everything in their team.”
The problem with that earlier approach was a less-than-desirable developer experience, he said, where they individually had to work things out with lots of teams, and they had to orchestrate it all on their own to make it work.
This is where platform democracy is now making a difference. The goal is to use this democratization and get real improvements in place, said Plank.
For example, said Plank, a Java developer starts a new job on a Monday, and within his first hour under a platform democracy approach, he can set up a namespace as a service to deploy a Java app, quickly type in a hello world message, and then publish it successfully because all the right tools are there and ready to go.
“If he can do that, all within less than one hour, he starts to contribute to the bank from day one, not from day 63 or however long it took him before to read all the manuals, learn how to set up his desktop, and accomplish all these things that we did in the past,” he said. “It is a rapid enabler that lets them just get their job done.”
NatWest’s work on platform democracy efforts for its developers is continuing.
“What we are trying to do is get to the point where we can start doing some of that centrally for them,” said Plank. “We can get them to contribute if they have time, resources, capability, and then they can contribute to the platform in a democratized way. And we can actually start making products together in a democratized way, so that the company’s central technology organization does not have to do everything itself.”
