The Golden Path to Platform Engineering

Along with discussing the emergence and ascension of platform engineering in this episode, we also discuss the role that Humanitec plays in helping organizations establish platforms for developers, as well as Backstage, a popular open source internal developer platform that was developed by Spotify for its own developers.

An IDP, our guest Kaspar Von Grünberg explained, is a standardized interface for developers to build applications using a golden path of vetted tools and libraries, allowing for a high degree of efficiency for both the developers themselves as well as the engineers who are supporting the developers. They can include an integration and delivery plane, a continuous integration registry, a platform orchestrator, observability tools and a resource plane.

"How you're consuming this is a little bit up to the individual preference of the user, and what the platform team has configured for you. So we're seeing some teams like to use a user interface and some teams like to use code based interactions," Von Grünberg explained.

In some ways, a IDP is reminiscent of the platform-as-a-service packages of a decade ago. They also were designed to help developer efficiency, though devs chafed at the limited number of tools they were allowed to use in these walled gardens. That was a mistake, Von Grünberg said.

Those platforms required developers to use a small set of pre-defined times.

"We don't want to get back to those times, which is why we want to provide sensible defaults," Von Grünberg said. A good IDP will provide developers with "golden paths" or "paved roads" as Netflix calls them.

"Developers can stay on those paths if they want," Von Grünberg said. They can enjoy the security default and service-level agreements (SLAs) from the engineers. But developers are also free to leave the path and make low-level configurations on their own as well.

"Good platform engineering is never about covering all the use cases," he said.

Learn more from The New Stack about platform engineering and Humanitec:

Platform Engineering Overview, News, and Trends

How to Pave Golden Paths That Actually Go Somewhere

Build Your IDP at Light Speed with a Platform Reference Architecture