Platform engineering is taking the IT world by storm. We’re seeing articles claiming that platform engineering is finally going to end the DevOps reign and achieve everything DevOps never could – agility, automation, developer experience, efficiency and governance. The path to IT transformation and business growth that the new trend paints through self-service seems so painfully obvious, but let us tell you a little secret – it is not new. The trend might be a fresh marketing buzzword, but forward-thinking companies have already been utilizing the benefits of a platform engineering approach. Today’s platform teams are tasked with exactly this: building and maintaining an internal developer platform that connects the end-user to infrastructure management through simple developer self-service and improves efficiency and developer experience.
This idea has been working in practice for a while — and we should know, since improving operational efficiency through a developer platform with self-service is Cycloid’s core offer. We’ve recently used platform engineering to help our client Alchemy scale their automation and move infrastructure to Kubernetes on AWS.
Here’s what we did step by step:
Step 1: Take an Opinionated Approach to the Development Environment
Alchemy is a digital asset management company that helps organizations to implement the open solution for managing digital content using Phraseanet, and starting now with the brand new Phrasea, a promising DAM/MAM on AWS. They have a small team of developers that were able to service their clients needs – but as the company grew, they needed a way to scale up effortlessly.
