Platform Engineering

Chapter 2. The Pillars of Platform Engineering

The carrying power of a bridge is not the average strength of the pillars, but the strength of the weakest pillar.

Zygmunt Bauman

Now that we’ve talked about the “why” of platform engineering, let’s talk about the “what.” Remember the initial definition we gave in Chapter 1:

Platform engineering is the discipline of developing and operating platforms. The goal of this discipline is to manage overall system complexity in order to deliver leverage to the business. It does this by taking a curated product approach to developing platforms as software-based abstractions that serve a broad base of application developers, operating them as foundations of the business.

From this definition, we can identify the four pillars of platform engineering practice:

Product

Taking a curated product approach

Development

Developing software-based abstractions

Breadth

Serving a broad base of application developers

Operations

Operating as foundations for the business

These four pillars are critical to platform engineering success. Without them, you end up pushing the complexity around, but not actually managing it. Approaches that have come before have not managed to square this circle. This is not surprising, because building good platforms is hard! That’s precisely why we wrote this book. In this chapter, we’ll outline why we view these as the pillars of platform engineering, and what they look like in terms of underpinnings.

Taking a ...