Practical Platform Engineering in 5 Lunches is a blog post series that walks you through building a hands-on Internal Developer Platform (IDP) with Octopus Deploy.
These blog posts can be completed during your lunch break, with each post taking about 30 minutes. Notably, you don’t need any passwords or any other platforms beyond a free trial instance of Octopus.
By the end of the series, you’ll have a fully functional IDP that you can use as a reference for building your own Platform Engineering solutions.
In this introductory post, we’ll set up the basic prerequisites and introduce some of the core concepts we’ll use throughout the series.
Getting an Octopus instance
Sign up for a free trial of Octopus Cloud at https://octopus.com/start. The cloud-hosted version of Octopus is the easiest way to get started, as it doesn’t require any additional configuration to work with the Octopus AI Assistant.
Then install the Octopus AI Assistant Chrome extension from the Chrome Web Store.
Defining common terms
We’ll need a common language to discuss the concepts we’ll use throughout the series.
What is DevOps?
This is perhaps a controversial opinion, but DevOps has lost its meaning. Any term that becomes the target of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ceases to be a useful term. DevOps is unfalsifiable - literally any practice, tool, or process used by technical teams can be labelled as DevOps.
So I’ll use DevOps as a broad term referring to teams and processes that work with technology.
What is Platform Engineering?
Platform Engineering is the practice of scaling architectural decisions.
That’s it.
I like this definition of architecture from “Objects, Components, and Frameworks With UML: The Catalysis Approach” by Desmond D’Souza and Alan Wills, which defines “architecture” as:
The set of design decisions about any system (or smaller component) that keeps its implementors and maintainers from exercising needless creativity.
More simply, Platform Engineering provides common solutions to common problems so your teams can focus on solving valuable problems.
What is an Internal Developer Platform (IDP)?
An Internal Developer Platform (IDP) comprises the tools, systems, and processes you use to distribute and maintain architectural decisions.
That’s it.
It can be a wiki, a set of scripts in a shared repository, or a fully fledged self-service portal. The specific implementation doesn’t matter, as long as it provides a way to share and maintain architectural decisions.
We’ll use Octopus as a repository for architectural decisions that can be updated and distributed to DevOps teams.
How does Platform Engineering relate to CI/CD?
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) focuses on delivering software to consumers. Platform Engineering streamlines CI/CD processes by providing a common set of tools and processes for building, testing, and deploying software. This allows teams to focus on delivering value to customers rather than building and maintaining every aspect of their CI/CD pipelines.
How does Octopus support Platform Engineering?
Octopus provides Platform Hub, which is an opinionated solution for defining, maintaining, and distributing shared processes and policies to support the delivery and maintenance of software.
Platform Hub is based on Git and uses Git based workflows to enable the development, testing, and approval of changes to shared processes and policies.
Platform Hub resources are versioned using SemVer and distributed to consumers in accordance with the semantic meanings of major, minor, and patch versions. Consumers can choose to automatically consume the latest version of a resource or manually update to new versions when they are released.
These features allow Platform Hub to define a set of architectural decisions (in the form of process templates and policies) that are maintained and distributed to consumers at scale.
What just happened?
At the end of this post, you have:
- Created a trial Octopus instance and installed the Octopus AI Assistant Chrome extension.
- Learned the basic concepts of DevOps, Platform Engineering, and Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs).
- Learned the relationship between Platform Engineering and CI/CD.
What’s next?
You are 20% done with the series. You now have a trial instance of Octopus, the AI Assistant Chrome extension, and an understanding of the core concepts we’ll be using throughout the series.
In the next post, you’ll create a simple Kubernetes deployment project and begin exploring the features of Platform Hub.
