DevOps is an approach to software development that shortens feedback loops by improving collaboration between development and operations teams. Platform engineering is a complementary discipline that provides developers with self-service tools and processes, making it easier for them to achieve their tasks and enable good DevOps practices.
Understanding the differences between DevOps and platform engineering allows you to more effectively optimize your workflows for increased throughput, stability, and developer satisfaction.
This article explains how the two concepts relate, then illustrates how Quali’s users leverage them to achieve their software development goals.
What Is DevOps?
DevOps removes the traditional gap between developers and operations teams. The responsibilities of a DevOps engineer involve making software delivery process quicker and more responsive, reducing time spent waiting for the other team to apply actions or supply information.
DevOps teams often use tools such as CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and containers to automate the development process. They’re also responsible for establishing scalable collaboration methods that help different teams interact with each other effectively. Overall, there’s no single way to implement a DevOps practice, as it entails any strategy that makes the software development culture more efficient.
What Is Platform Engineering?
Platform engineering is one answer to how to implement a DevOps practice. It’s a specific approach to building developer-oriented tooling that helps you attain DevOps outcomes.
Whereas DevOps sets out high-level principles for improving workflows through automation and collaboration, platform engineers implement those principles by creating purpose-built structured toolchains.
Platform teams exist to serve the needs of developers by building and maintaining an internal developer platform (IDPs) and/or portal. These platforms grant the development team self-service access to execute key tasks independently, such as:
- Provisioning a new dev environment
- Checking a deployment’s progress
- Performing critical day-2 actions, e.g., collecting monitoring data, adjusting deployment scaling settings, and other basic infrastructure management operations
The platform team prioritizes delivering a developer experience that provides a singular destination to access the resources they need. At the same time, the platform team can leverage the internal developer platform as a centralized location for security and compliance enforcement.
DevOps vs Platform Engineering
DevOps is the combination of modern workflows, tools, best practices, and cultural aspects that enable software engineering teams to succeed. It uses short iterative development cycles, tight feedback loops, and robust automated tooling to improve productivity.
Platform engineering is the process of building automated tooling as a cohesive internal developer platform for developers to use.
The two disciplines affect dev workflows in different ways. DevOps opens up communication channels between teams and leads to more process automation, such as by implementing CI/CD systems to deploy changes and IaC tools that provision infrastructure. Yet these tools are often inaccessible to developers or are challenging for non-specialists to use. For example, developers may be unable to interact with deployment logs or utilize available IaC configs to provision their own test environments.
Platform engineering solves these challenges by providing a safe self-service layer for developer access. Devs can use convenient self-service catalogs to discover and engage with pre-built platform capabilities, such as one-click infrastructure provisioning and convenient day-2 deployment management.
Platform engineering also plays a valuable role in making complex DevOps processes accessible to less experienced developers. Instead of having to master complicated DevOps tools like Terraform, Ansible, and Kubernetes, devs can stay focused on writing new product features while using the platform’s service catalog to conveniently engage with the broader DevOps toolchain. This gives developers more autonomy, without making them become CI/CD, IaC, or cloud-native experts.
The following table highlights the benefits that platform engineering lends to DevOps:
| DevOps | Platform Engineering | |
| Purpose | Optimized software delivery lifecycle | Optimize developer experience via the delivery of an internal developer platform |
| Outcomes | Improved collaboration, tighter feedback loops, iterative development, and increased automation | Improved developer productivity by automating and democratizing access to resources for both DevOps and development teams |
| Audience | Everyone involved with the project | Developers, but may also benefit DevOps engineers via increased automation and scalability |
| Methodology | Cultural methodology, broad impact on everyone involved with the project | Product methodology, with the platform team maintaining internal platforms as an asset for developers to use |
| Impact on Developers | More responsive development process due to improved cross-team communication and increased automation | Access to self-service actions that automate key tasks on demand |
DevOps vs Platform Engineering: Which to Use?
Platform engineering is best seen as a route to DevOps success. Building an internal developer platform enables you to more effectively automate processes and make your workflows more collaborative.
Nurturing a strong DevOps culture optimizes your performance at each stage of the software delivery lifecycle. Within this, platform engineering provides technical solutions that streamline the development, testing, deployment, and maintenance stages by granting developers the ability to self-serve resources.
Using Quali for DevOps and Platform Engineering
Quali Torque is a platform for managing self-service cloud environments. It supports software development, DevOps tasks, and other mission-critical functions. Torque uses IaC configs and other DevOps tools to generate environment-as-code templates that devs can launch in just a few clicks. Developers don’t have to interact with complex IaC tools or cloud platforms themselves.
Torque enables DevOps teams to submit natural-language AI promtps to generate entirely new environment-as-code templates. These templates can be added to Torque’s native self-service catalog, where developers can launch complete dev, test, staging, demo, or even production environments in a single click—in addition to integrations with popular CI/CD, IDE, and internal developer portal tools.
Torque can also:
- Automate day-2 actions on live application environments that teams launch, thereby making it easier for DevOps teams to maintain performance, cost efficiency, and security and compliance for cloud environments.
- Detect configuration drift in live environments and identify the cause, improving stability and reducing the ops team’s workload.
- Enforce custom policies to deny the deployment of any cloud resource that violates configured standards such as the use of unapproved technologies or resources that would cause excessive cloud costs.
- Track all activity, performance, and cloud costs for the resources deployed via the catalog, enabling both DevOps and platform teams to identify ways to further optimize the software development lifecycle.
Watch a brief demo to understand how Quali Torque supports platform engineering:
Quali’s tools let you automate infrastructure access and eliminate manual interactions with IaC tools. This boosts development velocity, a key indicator of DevOps success. Torque also robustly supports platform engineering requirements, such as through easy configuration of templated actions for day-2 tasks and environment management.
Summary
DevOps and platform engineering amplify software delivery success by improving automation and collaboration. Both exist to make software delivery easier, faster, and more reliable. DevOps establishes high-level cultural principles and processes that enable efficient workflows, while platform engineering implements those processes by creating simple self-service tools that developers can run on demand.
Quali’s platform supports DevOps teams and platform engineers with infrastructure orchestration, environment as code, self-service provisioning, and continual governance and compliance.
Leverage your existing IaC and CI/CD tools, and grant developers safe access to the infrastructure resources they need. Explore the Quali Torque playground, or book a demo today.