It’s about the core but don’t forget the colleagues
The modernisation of telos using DevOps could run into problems unless their roadmaps are shared and the expansion plans are more inclusive, according to a study by DevOps specialist Puppet by Perforce. The software company’s news 2023 State of DevOps report, Platform Engineering says that rapid progress by DevOps may leave important people behind. It identified team adoption as a step in the right direction.
Platform engineering is brilliant at moving enterprises out of the middle stages of evolution and into the heights, according to the report. The problem is that too many in, say, a telco get sidelined by rapid and unexplained changes. The security teams don’t have time to patch all the settings for all the new virtual systems being created, often because they don’t have an automated system to keep pace. So, while the DevOps teams are thundering into the cloud on a glory hunt, they are leaving behind their own type of legacy – exposures that hackers can exploit and users that are none the wiser.
Platform engineering is the discipline of designing and building self-service in order to minimize the cognitive load for developers and speed software delivery. The ethos is inform teams that they must share infrastructure with those internal users who actually create the value, says the report. Typically software developers and engineers colonise a system and treat it as their platform and a product for their users, rather than a group IT project with a shared objective.
“Enterprises with more mature DevOps practices tend to use platform teams,” said Ronan Keenan, Research Director at Puppet by Perforce, “This doesn’t mean you must adopt a platform team model to be good at DevOps. Rather, it’s that a platform team is a well-defined and proven path to succeed with DevOps at scale.”
Platform engineering can produce meaningful benefits across an entire organization and unlock DevOps success for the enterprise, according to Nigel Kersten, CTO, Puppet by Perforce. In order to achieve this, they have to create an inclusive culture, continuously investing in the platform team, connecting with users through functional feedback loops and constantly evolving the product management skills in the team. Only then will they have a hope of creating the “fast flow delivery and an ongoing reduction in cognitive load for developers,” said Kersten, who is also co-author of the State of DevOps Report. “As firms beef up hiring for platform teams, they must prioritise product management skills, not just core engineering.”
The emergence of Platform engineering has been welcomed by Sabrina Battiston, Community Lead for Women in DevOps.“We are looking forward to taking ownership of DevOps practices and taking [these findings] to their respective organizations,” said Battiston.
Last week Blue Planet, an independent network software division of equipment maker Ciena, outlined the dilemma for telcos in a briefing to journalists. The race to create 5G networks forces mobile network operators to ditch their legacy static inventory and adopt dynamic inventory systems, said Kailem Anderson, VP of Portfolio and Engineering at Blue Planet. Moving to the rapid tempo of 5G, edge and multiple-clouds involves adopting all kinds of new codes, said Anderson.