Platform engineering fills a need for agencies looking to achieve mission outcomes at a fair price as their budgets tighten.
Agencies must continue delivering services while getting a handle on their technical debt, and platform engineering affords them a better understanding of how their legacy IT infrastructure functions.
Platform engineering refers to the design and operation of internal, self-service developer platforms to supplement experience and boost productivity. Gartner predicts that 80% of large software engineering outfits will have a team dedicated to the practice by 2026.
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Platform Engineering Leverages Infrastructure as Code
To better understand platform engineering, it helps to understand Infrastructure as Code.
Imagine an agency requires additional personnel to open network ports to accommodate new video surveillance equipment it’s installed at all of its offices. The process of committing, testing and rebooting each port manually across a large agency could take months.
Infrastructure as Code manages and provisions IT infrastructure using code rather than doing so manually. In the above example, lines of code can be committed to a switch to change whatever a developer wants, then repeat that change enterprisewide as many times as needed over a weekend.
Platform engineering leverages Infrastructure as Code as part of a platform that an agency’s technical team can use to create tool chains and workflows enabling self-service capabilities. More than that, it unites teams of software developers (responsible for building things such as features in applications) with data center teams (responsible for opening and closing tickets and keeping hardware operational) under a single operating model to deliver services more efficiently.
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Repeatability, Security and Immutability for Agencies
The repeatability of automated Infrastructure as Code avoids human error, such as a developer accidentally leaving a Secure Shell port open and exposing the agency to a cyberattack.
Relying on code further allows developers to instantly revert to an earlier version of what they were working on in the event an error is made.
Industry is already leveraging artificial intelligence to more easily navigate the complex interdependencies between servers, virtual layers, tool chains, and agency or third-party infrastructure. AI is better at finding the most effective network route or identifying the cause of a minor app glitch that happens once a month.
AI can also spot anomalies and vulnerabilities faster than humans can, which means agencies won’t need as many employees dedicated to such tasks.
CDW Government’s approach to platform engineering is platform agnostic because agency tooling varies. We work with agencies to focus on their overall operating models, conduct a gap analysis and add only the technologies necessary for platform engineering, all while leveraging the legacy tools already in place.
This allows agencies to slowly invest in their digital transformations, improving operations and ridding themselves of technical debt.
This article is part of FedTech’s CapITal blog series.
