This blog is an excerpt from the Manning MEAP (Manning Early Access Program) book, Effective Platform Engineering. In MEAP, you read a book chapter-by-chapter while it’s being written and get the final eBook as soon as it’s finished. In the book, the authors imagine working for a company called PETech that is facing problems with efficiency around practices deploying and operating software to production. Read on to find out about how PETech leverages platform engineering to solve inefficient practices deploying and operating software to production.
Throughout this book we will imagine working for a company called PETech that is facing problems with inefficient practices deploying and operating software to production, which will be similar to situations we have seen in many real companies.
PETech’s problems are significant, and platform engineering practices will be shown to dramatically improve operations. The problems at your company may be similar, and by following the journey of PETech, hopefully you will be able to see how using platform engineering practices and implementing an engineering platform can improve things!
The background of PETech
PETech is a retail company that has been in business for a long time, and the business was initially built on a monolithic application.
As more and more teams have spun up in the last few years, the company has moved to a microservice architecture with teams owning what they build. As more and more services are added, the development teams are starting to see problems with releasing and supporting software efficiently. When new features are requested, it can take weeks to deploy any changes once development is complete.
In figure 1.1, we show the manual inefficient deployment process at PETech which may not be too unlike many similar organizations.
Engineers drowning in complexities
With any change, there are multiple handoffs and stages because different teams are responsible for deploying and verifying any code change before it is allowed into production including security, compliance and governance tests.
Engineers are drowning in the complexities of these controls because they know any change that fails a test will result in a rejected deployment, adding even more time to release. Once those features are released — because running the software is owned by another team any bugs and fixes take quite a while to resolve — requires time consuming back and forth communication.
When we talk to software engineers, both in situations like PETech, or in situations that have started to improve from this but still have room to grow, we ask them:
- What if you could build and deploy a new service in an hour?
- What if you could build software rapidly and allow for the same degree of control and governance required by the enterprise?
- What if it were easy to test a change with only a portion of the users before rolling it out to everyone?
- If an issue occurs in production, what if the developers knew about it immediately, or even before it occurred and could fix it quickly?
Making software development fun again
In short, what if we could make creating, deploying, and running new software changes a non-event in your workflow, speeding up delivery and making development fun again?
By implementing the principles and practices of Platform Engineering at clients ranging from scaling startups to large enterprises, we have repeatedly seen that this can be achieved for engineering teams of all skill sets and sizes.
The Manning MEAP book Effective Platform Engineering aims to empower readers to embrace and implement platform engineering practices within their own organizations by following PETech’s transformative journey, achieving rapid and reliable software delivery, streamlined deployment processes, and the enhanced ability to minimize and recover from production issues.
This approach ultimately leads to customer delight, success in your organization’s mission, and engineers doing what they love to do, focusing on writing software.
If you’re ready to keep going, read the next blog in our series: What is Platform Engineering or skip right to downloading the Manning book, Effective Platform Engineering.
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