Platform Engineering: The Pioneers Who Built It
Like other big software innovations, platform engineering was inspired by developers and systems administrators who dreamed that there had to be better and more efficient ways to do their work.
So in developer communities, tech conferences, coffeehouses and workplaces around the world, curious developers shared and imagined new ideas for writing, sharing, improving and building better applications for their tasks and companies.
Driven by these needs, these innovators came up with a framework, gave the project components names and definitions, and collaborated to plan and build what is today the still-emerging science of platform engineering.
And like every major software project, it has taken a wide range of individual developers to do the hard work together and create the starting point from which platform engineering has grown since about 2015.
In this article we dive into the personal stories and motivations of some of the people who helped to dream up the idea of platform engineering and bring it to fruition for development teams and systems administrators. This latest story is a companion to The New Stack’s recent story on The Birth and Continuing Evolution of Platform Engineering, which shared platform engineering’s intriguing history so far.
Platform Engineering ‘Grew Out of Necessity’
As a software developer and executive since the 1990s, Ajay Chankramath has witnessed a lot of changes in how software is built and used over the last few decades.
“Platform engineering has evolved as a direct response to the challenges faced by organizations as they scale their digital infrastructure,” Chankramath, managing director of platform and product engineering at Brillio, a digital transformation services and consulting firm, told The New Stack. “The discipline grew out of necessity, much like DevOps, but with a distinct focus on creating platforms that could abstract infrastructure complexity, enable automation and improve developer experience.”
While DevOps was originally seen as a valuable way to build better software just a few years ago, it quickly became apparent that DevOps was unable to scale for teams of more than about 50 developers, he said.
“I have been working on improving development and engineering productivity for a long time since the early 1990s and was looking for a way to bring in the rigors of top-notch product management into building internal products,” said Chankramath. “It was mostly the large developer communities I was supporting at every job I was doing as the leader of a productivity tools or a DevOps team. The stickiness, scalability and composability of the solutions we were providing the developers were not optimal until platform engineering came around.”
That was how he became involved in the early days of the platform engineering movement, he said, by seeing the shortcomings of traditional application development processes up close and looking for ways to bring in needed changes, he explained.
“The best way to solve the problem above was to be at the forefront driving the change,” said Chankramath, who previously worked as the head of platform-engineering developer experience and FinOps at the platform consultancy Thoughtworks. “Much like the early days of Linux, platform engineering was born out of necessity and shaped by a community of innovators who recognized that traditional methods could not scale.”
For Chankramath, he was also motivated by how platform engineering enables organizations to break down silos and streamline complex workflows, he said.
“Seeing firsthand how a well-implemented platform can transform not only the productivity but also the culture of a team made me realize the power of this approach,” he said. “The opportunity to help organizations transition from legacy systems to modern, cloud native architectures without disrupting operations continues to be deeply rewarding, especially when we can achieve meaningful growth and impact for both the teams and the business.”
Here Are Some of the Leaders Who Have Built Platform Engineering
There were plenty of other people who believed in the same strengths and promises of platform engineering and played instrumental roles in shaping the still-emerging technology, according to Chankramath.
This includes Benjamin Hindman, co-creator of Apache Mesos, “who was critical in developing distributed systems that inspired platform-related technologies,” and Charity Majors, a co-founder of Honeycomb.io, who “advocated for observability as a core aspect of platform engineering that emphasized the need for operational visibility in distributed systems,” said Chankramath.
In addition, Kelsey Hightower, a retired distinguished engineer at Google, “was a key advocate for Kubernetes and the platform engineering practices that simplify developer workflows,” while Manual Pais and Matthew Skelton, wrote a landmark book, “Team Topologies,” which “changed the way we think about platform organizations,” said Chankramath.
Another platform engineering innovator, Sam Newman, “a thought leader in microservices and platform thinking, has focused on how organizations can build scalable platforms that improve developer productivity,” while Jez Humble, author of “Continuous Delivery” and “The DevOps Handbook,” helped define how platform engineering can extend DevOps principles to enable continuous delivery pipelines at scale,” according to Chankramath.
Other leaders in the platform engineering movement include Kaspar von Grünberg and Luca Galante, both of Humanitec, “who have done more to push the platform engineering community than anyone else in the world through their orchestrator solution, as well as the scoring framework currently part of CNCF,” Chankramath said.
In addition, there is Evan Bottcher, who wrote What I Talk About When I Talk About Platforms on Martin Fowler’s blog, and Daniel Bryant and his team at Syntasso, “which has been doing some tremendous work in calling attention to the need for a stand-alone platform that can be orchestrated across the board in your software development life cycle,” wrote Chankramath.
So, What Drove These People to Dive In and Help to Build Platform Engineering?
“They are often selfless and driven by seeing others rise up within the community and begin contributing,” Daniel Bryant, a platform engineer and head of product marketing at Syntasso, told The New Stack. “Many of the excellent leaders within platform engineering strike a balance between innovation — building tools, doing demos at events and getting feedback — and trying to compound knowledge such as standardizing terminology, techniques and frameworks. A good example can be seen in the CNCF Platform Working Group, where the team behind the CNCF Platform Whitepaper and Platform Engineering Maturity Model did amazing work. It was driven bottom-up and is now truly owned by the community.”
The developers and visionaries who have been working on furthering platform engineering share their dedication to making a difference because they are driven by “firsthand experience of the related pains and a desire to share the solutions with others,” said Bryant. “I got into platform engineering because I was always the “CI/CD and Jenkins person on development teams.”
A colleague, Abby Bangser, “worked in QA and saw firsthand the challenges a poorly defined platform could have on the ability to test software,” said Bryant. “Both of us have always loved learning and teaching, and we felt compelled to share our experiences with the community. This began as contributions to the DevOps space, and then we moved to platform engineering as this discipline emerged and aligned even closer with our interests and skills.”
That is what inspires the other leaders in platform engineering as well, he said.
“They have done the hard work and experienced the pains, and want others to build upon their work,” said Bryant. “Frequently, leaders are motivated to ensure the next generation of engineers do not repeat previous mistakes. Instead, they should be free to build upon the current state-of-the-art and make new mistakes — and pay this forward to the community to continue the positive cycle.”
Jack Gold, principal analyst at J.Gold and Associates LLC, said he has seen this dedication in other software segments as developers and visionaries get interested in new concepts like platform engineering.
“It is really about breaking down boundaries they see as inhibiting the types of advances they envision,” said Gold. “Most visionaries and entrepreneurs see problems that other people think are just normal. They try to make things better, easier, quicker, less costly, etc. It is usually an ‘aha moment’ from their work in a particular technology or business function.”
That internal need to solve a problem is what drives and motivates them to take these leadership roles, said Gold, “and an expectation that they can do it better than anyone else. It is their entrepreneurship and a real desire to solve problems other people have not even recognized yet.”
