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What's your take on Platform Engineering, Vijay?

too much time is spent building the commodity pieces still, the real investment for platform teams is building the business logic abstractions that accelerate. The problem is the vendors and even OSS are selling point solutions that need to get stitched together or are full blown PaaS that can’t adapt/don’t consider brownfield

Platform Engineering is a shift from an operational mindset to a product mindset. It's a shift from "you build it, we run it" to "you build it, you run it". (you = developers, we = infra teams) An IDP is the product that the platform team provides so that developers are enabled to build and run it themselves. It would be hard to detach the product from a product-driven philosophy.

IDP is step 1 maybe but its pretty limited in scope.

Just wanted to share my 2 cents here. In my experience, the way I have observed it that there are multiple layers of software abstraction in the organization: 1. At the top is the actual products and services that generate revenue for an organization. 2. There could be multiple product offerings with common domain level capabilities which could be encapsulated in "Business Capability Platforms" 3. These "Business Capability Platforms" and products / services may rely on multiple "Technology Platforms" e.g. API Gateways, Data & Analytics Platforms, AI/ML Platforms etc. that organization may have invested in. 4. All these Products and Services as well Business and Technology Platforms rely on foundational capabilities e.g. CI/CD, Infrastructure Management & Provisioning, Configuration Management, Observability, Service Templates etc. which is I believe is the scope of IDP or Internal Development Platform. Basically, IDP would encompass various Day 0, Day 1 and Day 2 capabilities offered in a self-service manner that can enable Product/Services, Business Capability & Technology platform teams accelerate delivery of their solutions. These Day 0, 1 & 2 capabilities have been highlighted in following articles: 1. Gartner - Innovation Insight for Internal Developer Portals 2. Adobe IDP Capabilities 3. Platform Engineering at Palo Alto Networks I definitely agree that Platform Engineering is a broad term and in my opinion IDP is one type/category of Platform. I wouldn't consider them as synonym in that sense and view IDP as a subset of the broader field of Platform Engineering.

Thanks others for sharing their thoughts on this so far . In my view Platform engineering is a multidisciplinary skill and field that involves creating and maintaining the underlying platforms on which software is developed and run. This often involves designing, implementing, and managing cloud-based infrastructures, databases, and other technologies that developers and applications rely on. Platform engineering also includes aspects of cloud computing, infrastructure design, scalability, and system performance. I have seen the similar pattern being happened while ago : we used to refer systems engineering a lot and it got wiped with devops and SRE , performance engineering etc .. The reason why I brought up this discussion here because , almost after years of being into multiple iterations 🔁 with different naming as , platform engineering emerged as it’s own field and right away it’s being taking off to narrowed focus areas by equating to IDP and developer tooling etc . Let’s try to support platform engineering to emerge fully as broader field on its own and let it be equally recognized as software engineering and not to narrow it to just one or two focused areas .

all platform engineers are software engineers ;)

Haha. May be I should be more specific then . Software development engineering