I’m sure a handful of y’all have already seen this, but I couldn’t resist sharing it anyways. 🙂 My latest article in The New Stack covers the differences between DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering. The gaps are smaller than you might think, but they’re also what make platform engineering so important. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Is there anything I missed? https://thenewstack.io/how-is-platform-engineering-different-from-devops-and-sre/

I read this a couple days ago. I like how short and concise it is. I think you did an awesome job with this 👍

That article is the reason I am here 🙂

I read it a couple days ago too and it was a very interesting read ! it is crystal clear and point out cognitive load as a problem with devops implementation in company. I personally couldn’t put words to this problem, so many thanks for that ! 🙏 However, I find that it confronts too much Platform Engineering (PE) to DevOps or SRE. Platform Engineering should embrace DevOps and make one’s contribution to it. That’s what Google did with their “SRE implements DevOps” motto and I don’t see this as a wrong thing 🤔 In my opnion, opposing PE to DevOps creates the risk of failing again in improving communication or right standardization. Creating a great Internal Development Platform NEEDS DevOps mindset to be successful, because creating this kind of product needs strengthening communication between product team, marketing, developers, security team and ops team 😄

@antoine meynard what do you mean by a DevOps mindset? “You build it, you run it”?

DevOps means reducing time to market (short feedback loop) so reduce time between idea and release it to customers (this is what DORA metrics mesures at least). At the beginning it was to make Ops and Dev work in the same room so that Ops team can hear when Dev were furious about something. As it does not work (especially in a fully-remote world) we had to find new ways, which is what “you build it, you run it” was (placing ops in the same team as dev), but as your article correctly points out it does not work (especially for big companies). So we have to find new ways and platform engineering seems to be one valuable solution. In my understanding of it Platform Engineering is also about quickly put ideas to production and directly face customer (the dev) for feedback : reducing feedback loop is one aspect of DevOps mindset, so for me Platform Engineering should implement DevOps like SRE did

I felt it was light on substance. DevOps has too much cognitive load, everyone implements fake SRE, so focus on self-service and listen to your customers then all your problems will be solved. This is a very simplified view. I also don't view platform engineering as a replacement for DevOps or SRE. It feels like automation with rails. At least DevOps and SRE can be applied to existing services and doesn't have the huge initial investment that a platform does. A golden path doesn't help when you already have 2000 services built a different way. It's also very easy for people to walk off the golden path and need something that turns your platform into a bottleneck. For example, they want to use Azure and your golden path was built for AWS or the next project is Nodejs and your platform was built for Java. You also have to be careful with a product mindset because your customers aren't buying anything so they can ask for everything and they will. Then every team you talk with is going to have different needs. Do you focus on meeting the needs of the one customer or try to find a happy medium that makes no one happy? Or worse, try to cover everything?