What is Platform Engineering? A Quick Introduction

Technology usage is no longer restricted to IT or software organizations in this digital era. Today, every business is a technology business, with software fueling all operations. With every process, decision, and experience-dependent on technology, building software at an accelerated pace – without compromising on quality – is the need of the hour. 

What is Digital Platform Engineering?

Platform engineering services help build and operate self-service platforms created and maintained by a dedicated product team. These platforms are designed to support users' needs by interfacing with tools and processes and enabling the accelerated (and trouble-free) launch of new applications. Platform engineering is one of Gartner’s top 10 strategic trends for 2024. 

Digital platform engineering services empower businesses with the capabilities they need to accelerate platform delivery and, eventually, the pace at which they create value. Offering cutting-edge software development expertise and resources, platform engineering plays a huge role in digital transformation, from co-ideation to ongoing product optimization and end-of-life extension and support. 

Digital platform engineering improves the developer experience by reducing cognitive and enhancing productivity. Since developers can independently run, manage, and develop their applications, product reliability and security increase. 

Platform engineering services act as a bridge between traditional and modern solutions, helping organizations: 

• Standardize and automate the development environment and reduce cognitive load on coders. 
• Enable greater flexibility and adaptability to evolving needs by building modular architecture. 
• Ensure platform scalability and handle the increased load without extensive manual intervention. 
• Build and deliver new-age software products and solutions that meet or exceed customer expectations.  
• Optimize the developer experience through automation and quickly bring products to the market. 
• Foster cross-functional collaboration and improve efficiency across the product development lifecycle.  

Platform Engineering Solutions

Digital platform development services help businesses create and maintain robust, scalable, and user-friendly digital platforms. From platform strategy to UX design, API development to cloud integration, digital platform engineering solutions enable businesses to build and scale highly resilient and future-proof products. 

• Mobile Platform Engineering Solutions offer specialized services and tools to streamline mobile application development, deployment, and management. Providing integrated development environments and frameworks, they help automate CI/CD processes and streamline device and OS management, allowing rapid prototyping. 
   
• Cloud Platform Engineering Services aid organizations in designing, implementing, and managing scalable and reliable cloud infrastructure. They streamline cloud application development by supporting infrastructure such as code (IaC), microservices, version control, continuous integration, etc. 
   
• Quality Engineering Platform Solutions focus on ensuring software products meet the required quality standards. Via automated and shift-left testing, continuous integration and delivery, and continuous performance monitoring, they streamline test management and orchestration, strengthen reporting, and reduce the probability and costs of defects.  

Product and Platform Engineering

Product and platform engineering services help build software at an accelerated pace without compromising quality. Encompassing several concepts and practices, they help strengthen product functionality: 

• Product modernization can help businesses move away from their legacy ecosystem and embrace modern technological innovations with minimal hassle and maximum impact. 
   
• Comprehensive technology assessment can enable organizations to evaluate their current technology maturity through expert assessments, reviews, and advice and select or build solutions that best fit their needs. 
   
• Rapid prototyping can enable teams to transform ideas into business results through faster, less costly prototypes. 
   
• Architecture redesign can empower organizations to optimize system-level product DNA for new use cases and added revenue. 
   
• Proof-of-concept (POC) exercises can help unlock assured results, speeding time to market through strategic Minimum Viable Products or MVPs. 
   
• Security and performance optimization can strengthen the functionality and security of software products, enhancing customer trust and retention. 
   
• Cloud enablement can untether products and processes from rigid on-premises environments and propel them for greater availability, flexibility, and resilience. 
   
• Analytics and automation can empower organizations to act on the latest data insights and reduce product engineering efforts through automation. 

Platform Engineering Companies and Consulting

Platform engineering consulting services offer organizations the perfect solution for strengthening product development. Qualified and competent platform engineers can regularly assess, update, and optimize products while providing timely sustenance and end-of-life engineering services. 

• Offering support for bug fixes, maintaining the code base, custom enhancements, and UX modernization, platform engineering companies can: 
• Build scalable and flexible solutions that grow with the business, seamlessly handling increased load, traffic, and user demands. 
• Offer timely and comprehensive platform engineering consulting services to drive maximum results and value and pivot as needed. 
• Optimize resources and reduce overheads through continuous monitoring, right-sizing of instances, and automated workflows. 
• Improve product reliability and performance and minimize downtime and failures. 

Organizations looking to leverage platform engineering solutions for business growth must partner with the right product platform engineering company. To choose the right one, it is essential to: 

• Look for extensive experience and expertise in technologies and frameworks for new-age product development. 
• Review track records and evaluate past work and case studies to determine their success in delivering similar projects. 
• Understand their range of services and evaluate their scalability, flexibility, and security. 
• Guage their ability to establish and follow security and compliance best practices and adherence to industry-specific rules and regulations. 
• Evaluate their engagement and support model, giving extra attention to their helpdesk SLAs. 

Case Studies and Examples

Digital platform engineering services can genuinely transform organizations. Here are some real-world applications and success stories of platform engineering: 

Business Need: An IoT edge platform company wanted to test its application using real-world IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) data and perform advanced performance and scalability testing, including specialized interoperability and security testing.

Solution: Xoriant delivered various quality platform engineering services to boost the IoT edge platform's performance, scalability, and stability. Scalability testing was done to check data ingestion performance from sensors to the IoT edge platform via the gateway, and interoperability testing was carried out to ensure compatibility with a range of connected devices. 

Benefits: The delivery of quality engineering services enabled the client to optimize application response time, ensure high availability and performance, and achieve sensor interoperability certifications – thereby facilitating the delivery of digital innovations to its customers. 

Business Need: A fellowship and research opportunities (FRO) organization wanted to develop a standardized platform that would serve as the perfect intermediary between agencies and students.

Solution: Xoriant evaluated the client's requirements and delivered a range of platform engineering services, rebuilding the existing platform from the ground up using a modular architecture based on microservices. 

Benefits: The delivery of robust platform engineering services helped increase the platform's security and meet stringent government standards. The client could enjoy better platform compatibility and offer a streamlined user experience. 

Future Trends in Platform Engineering

Platform engineering plays a pivotal role in shaping organizations’ technological landscapes, facilitating enterprises to thrive in the face of evolving challenges. As digital platform engineering services become increasingly popular, here are some emerging trends and technologies shaping platform engineering: 

• Artificial Intelligence will become a crucial building block in digital platform engineering. It will enable businesses to predict and prevent system failures and performance issues while enhancing automation, personalization, and decision-making. 
• Serverless architectures are another trend shaping the future of digital platform engineering. They will enable businesses to quickly and efficiently build products and enjoy higher scalability, adaptability, and flexibility. 
• Edge computing will find excellent application in platform engineering, enabling organizations to make quicker data-driven decisions and reduce latency and bandwidth usage. 
• Platform engineering services companies will also increasingly adopt DevSecOps and zero-trust architectures, paving the way for better, stronger, and more comprehensive security integration early in the development lifecycle. 
• Infrastructure as Code will enable product and platform engineering companies to provision and support computing infrastructure using code instead of manual processes – thus reducing configuration errors and accelerating application development and deployment. 
• Low-code/no-code platforms will define the next stage of digital platform engineering services, enabling teams to simplify and speed up the development of new-age products and solutions. 

Conclusion

Building, reinventing, or modernizing powerful business apps is the need of the hour. Platform engineering services empower businesses with the tools, technologies, and frameworks to achieve this goal. Modern platform engineering services companies today offer user-friendly platforms that allow the creation of custom applications with stunning interfaces. According to Gartner, by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams as internal providers of reusable services, components, and tools for application delivery.

Using these digital engineering platforms, you can integrate essential features and achieve faster development cycles –with minimal coding. Offering a stable and scalable foundation to unify data, streamline workflows, and deliver rich digital experiences for your enterprise, platform engineering solutions can power tomorrow’s business today! 

Stay ahead of the latest trends in digital platform and product engineering to build successful, resilient, and future-proof platforms, optimize the developer experience, and accelerate the delivery of business value.