Choose your fighter: DevOps, SRE, or Platform Engineering 😈

Let’s get bakin’ 🥐

DevOps vs SRE vs Platform Engineering

“Why does platform engineering exist when DevOps and SRE are basically the same thing?”

It’s a harsh question, but it’s also fair. The differences between the disciplines are pretty subtle, but they’re also what make platform engineering so important.

Let’s start with DevOps. DevOps culture was kickstarted in 2006 by Werner Vogels famous declaration: “You build it, you run it!” This worked well for some organizations, but others struggled to implement the cultural shift well. What resulted was cognitive overload on developers and a whole host of other nasty antipatterns.

What about SRE? SRE was advertised by Google as something every organization could aspire to. And, like with DevOps, while there was nothing wrong with SRE in theory, poor implementation plagued a lot of organizations. In these organizations, the SRE role became very restrictive and reminiscent of the pre-DevOps operations bottleneck.

This is where platform engineering comes in. It uses a product approach to leverage the strengths of DevOps and SRE. Like DevOps, platform engineering enables developer self-service. Like SRE, it reduces errors and increases reliability. Platform engineering also finds the right level of abstraction to reduce cognitive load on developers, improving the efficiency of the organization.

The platform as product approach involves conducting user research, collecting regular feedback, creating a product roadmap, and marketing the platform internally. It is what sets platform engineering apart from DevOps and SRE. Platform as a product ensures that platform teams are focusing on the right problems and delivering the right features.

Like the disciplines that came before it, platform engineering can also be done badly. But that’s why this community – and this newsletter! – exist: to empower you to build platforms well. And we’re happy to have you here.

You can check out the full article here. Or dive into my latest thread, linked below.

Short on time? ⏳ We got you 🥐😋

🥐 Tim Osborne explored the idea of a fully remote, cloud-based option for building a development environment. He wrapped up his findings in a short (and insightful) article.

🥐 How powerful are IaC and GitOps when used together? According to Cliff Malmborg, the combination creates a strong e2e solution for balancing automation in development pipeline.

🥐 A few months ago, we ran a Platform Engineering salary survey. Now it's time to share the results! We hope you'll find them useful when negotiating for a salary 📈 😉👇

🥐 Here are 18 ways complex systems fail. Super useful resource for handling failure management.

🥐 Memes are out, funny videos are in. Definitely check out this YouTube channel.

That's a wrap on #7. Share the platform love by forwarding this email to a few friends 🤗

This newsletter is a community effort, so if you have anything awesome to share from the cloud-native world, send it our way. You can share your ideas here.

Until next week!

Stay crunchy 🥐

Luca