DevOps & Platform Engineering - What's The Difference? With Dave Williams

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Chris 00:45 - 1:04)

Today we're talking about the difference between DevOps and platform engineering. I'm Chris Hill, COO and co-founder of Massdriver, and I'm here with Dave Williams, CTO and co-founder of Massdriver. So Dave, talk to me about DevOps and platform engineering.

What are the differences between it, particularly when it comes to cloud application development?

Yeah, so I think it's a mindset shift. I think in the DevOps world, we were furiously trying to automate on demand. So somebody's like, “I have an idea for this project. Well, we need to deploy infrastructure, we need to deploy applications.” And I would go off into a corner and start typing up infrastructure as code and then making Jenkins pipelines. And it was all kind of part of like the building process.

But I think as time wore on, each team became a blocker for the other. You'd want an engineer to answer a question about the needs of their application, and they may not know yet, and they have to do some more kind of prototyping to figure that out. Likewise, I mean, some of these services are unwieldy and difficult to really run reliably.

And so I think as we kind of shift towards platform engineering, we're focused on building a product that can deliver on the needs of your software engineering teams. And so kind of more of like, I almost think about it like an e-commerce mindset. So think about like catalogs and inventory and being able to kind of like provide things on demand without like other teams being involved in the development process.

Chris 2:08

Gotcha. So do you think this is more an evolution of DevOps or a revolution to complete divergence from it?

I think it's the next step in DevOps. I think like DevOps was like automate everything. And I think now it's like make that automation on demand.

So do you think the skill sets of the practitioners is going to be the same or what are the different skill sets that we're going to need as we start embracing platform engineering?

So I think they're going to be largely the same. I think if you're an operations professional now, encoding best practices into the stuff that you make available is going to be really, really important, right? Like understanding kind of the business's security and compliance requirements and baking that into this infrastructure and these pipelines that are made available to your engineers.

I think the skills that are kind of missing are the software engineering and product skills. So building that kind of like self-service layer in that kind of like application that an engineer can interact with and then like meeting their demands when they need them and prioritizing based on like what that customer wants, I think is like largely absent in DevOps. So it's definitely like an evolution.

So you were talking about automation, how automation fits into this. It also seems like there's collaboration between these teams. So talk to me about the principles that we need to be able to enable that.

Yeah. So I think when you look at like a perfect example of two teams that don't talk to each other, like working together, you can think about like SaaS vendors, right? Stripe fulfills all the needs that I have as somebody who takes payment, but I don't work with them.

I don't like tell them what to put in their sprints and things like that. And I think all of that is enabled by kind of that platform element, right? And that UI, and then being able to kind of iterate on that UI based on like feedback that I received without anybody kind of being in the same room, in the same planning meetings.

And I think like that's where the kind of holdups in automation are really like resolved. It's like, “I have a catalog for you. I have all the things that you need. And like, if you're finding that you're bogged down in places, if you find that like you're confused by certain things, I can quickly iterate to address that stuff for you.”

So what ways would you say that DevOps and platform engineering differ in terms of scalability and infrastructure governance?

Yeah. So I think it's a shift left mindset into like a product workflow, right? So I think you kind of look at your customer, which is like engineering teams, and then you look at kind of their stakeholders and your stakeholders, which are the CTO, the CFO, the CEO, they all have concerns, right?

Certain level of compliance, a certain level of security, and theoretically like the flexibility to move fast and like approach the market. So I think shifting left all of that security and compliance and making sure that like you're aligned with the stakeholders and then making that available and basically like printable over and over and over again for that engineering team. Currently DevOps is much more like ad hoc work.

I mean, at minimum, it's copy pasting something. And at the most, it's like recreating the wheel every single time.

So it sounds like platform engineering is going to be the integration of a lot of these different concerns. So talk to me about that unified interface that you get with platform engineering compared to a lot of probably the workflow integration type of work that you'd see from DevOps.

Yeah. So in organizations that were doing pretty good at DevOps that I've been at, you'll see like a tool like Jenkins at the center of it, right? And it's a series of pipelines, a series of jobs that like perform something, but those trigger automations and they're not like connected to like the work of software engineering and running software in the cloud.

Right. And so I think the biggest thing with platform engineering is there's going to be richer context around how all of these jobs work together and which ones you need when. I think like making that a smooth customer experience is going to allow software engineering teams to just innovate so much faster and move so much faster.

I mean, when you're talking about customers there, you're talking about the customers being like the software engineers or are you talking about the customers being operation engineers?

I mean, interestingly enough, I'm kind of talking about both, right? Like I think if I could imagine a really strong platform, I'd be imagining something that's like pluggable, like a package manager, right? Where I can actually just like, if I follow the rules, if I build in terms of the framework, I can push this in and make it available to software engineers on the other side, lightning fast.

And that will allow software engineers to get what they need faster with all the compliance and security baked in ahead of time.

So then you're the CTO of Massdriver. Give me the pitch. How does Massdriver as a platform help these teams actually enable DevOps and get self-service and governance and security?

Yeah. So I think there's an interesting question of like, how much cognitive load does it require for somebody to run software and run a product in the cloud? I think in the DevOps world, it really requires you to like understand how to operate the meat grinder and then kind of make your own sausage.

I think in the world of platform engineering, it's much more like reading from a cookbook and getting the ingredients and understanding how it gets put together. And I think that's like the appropriate amount of cognitive load for an engineer. Like they need to understand how to run it, but they don't necessarily need to understand IAM.

They don't necessarily need to understand security groups. That stuff should just be automatic.

Dave, this was a great conversation. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us about platform engineering and DevOps and how companies are going to be able to embrace it. It was my pleasure.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Platform Engineering Podcast. Have a topic you would love to learn more about? Let us know at cory at massdriver.cloud. That's C-O-R-Y at M-A-S-S-D-R-I-V-E-R dot cloud. Catch you on the next one.