Analyst Insight Series: Conquering Complexity—the Bedrock of Successful Platform Engineering

About the Author Related Articles Analyst Insight Series: Conquering Complexity—the Bedrock of Successful Platform Engineering Transfer VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Operations Integration SDK Builds to a Private Container Registry in the deployed VCF Operations Environment VMware Cloud Foundation - Cloud on Your Terms Complexity has always been a core challenge when deploying cloud-native software such as Kubernetes. By extension, it is also a key consideration when implementing platform engineering practices and processes to manage cloud-native environments. To overcome the array of complexity-related challenges across infrastructures, applications, tools, and teams, enterprise organizations must enable simplified operations and maintain consistency with federated platforms that can integrate and evolve with a variety of technologies. Consolidated, unified platforms that support integration across venues and software components are critical to overcoming complexity. For Kubernetes, this also means supporting the many different open source components that make up an effective deployment, including orchestration, monitoring and observability, and security functions. Further, as cloud-native constructs and containers are deployed across a broader swath of enterprise applications, teams must centrally and consistently manage both container-based and VM-based applications on a single platform. Much like DevOps, platform engineering relies on breaking down silos within an organization to support teams and personas beyond software developers and IT admins (e. g. , cloud admins, platform engineers, security teams) with self-service capabilities, as well as aligned objectives and incentives to foster collaboration. Comprehensive, end-to-end platforms that seamlessly connect compute, storage, networking, and security resources with unified lifecycle management, and that also facilitate integrations across the software development and deployment process, can help enterprises to better support their broad array of applications and teams. This can help address complexity issues by allowing teams to centrally and consistently manage platforms using a common skillset, further reducing costs by reducing the need for new hires and talent acquisition. Conquering complexity and integration challenges associated with platform engineering can enable improved developer productivity, faster delivery time, improved security and higher-quality code—sought-after benefits that are frequently identified in our Voice of the Enterprise surveys.