Does Platform Engineering Make DevOps & DevSecOps Irrelevant?

By: Mark Troester on August 31, 2023

For those of us old enough to remember, the DevOps movement came onto the scene somewhere around 2007/2008. Its proponents railed against the traditional software model at the time, which called for the developers who wrote the code to be organizationally and functionally separate from those who deployed and supported the code. The reasoning behind the movement is that these siloed teams, concerned only with their own objectives, resulted in botched releases, significant delays, poor communication and, ultimately, unhappy customers. It took a few years to gain traction, but when Gartner got on board with the concept in 2011, adoption soared, and Agile development practices like automated build and test and continuous integration and delivery became the new norm.

Agile, DevOps and its promise of continuous integration and continuous delivery … well, delivered. Development and operations teams were finally on the same page, each able to see a current phase’s end goal, providing the flexibility to make changes and improvements along the way, speeding the delivery of quality software. Unfortunately, in these early years of DevOps success, security and compliance generally remained siloed. That silo resulted in security being an afterthought—stuck near the end of the application development life cycle. Consequently, security took the blame for release-delaying bottlenecks.

The year 2014 was notable for an exponential increase in security breaches compared to the year before. According to an article in Security Week, 2014 marked the year that, for the first time, one billion records were compromised in more than 1,500 notable data breaches, an increase of 80% from 2013. Home Depot, JP Morgan Chase and eBay were among the many exposed to attackers. Given these and other high-profile breaches, it was time to re-evaluate development processes and give security and compliance a seat at the table.

With research by Microsoft and others showing that 80% of security breaches were related to configuration errors, the concept of DevSecOps, putting security front and center in the Agile development process, ensures that assets are configured correctly in the first place, providing continuous compliance by running constant scans to identify configuration drift.

This approach can be extended beyond the data center to any cloud to any edge, where even applications can be managed and checked against compliance and security standards. You can even extend a single DevSecOps compliance framework to cloud native assets including Kubernetes and public cloud services.

Today, it is safe to say that the term “DevOps” is likely losing its relevance, but “DevSecOps” is alive and well, as long as the organization embraces the cultural, people and process changes necessary for success. Tools and technology are essential to DevSecOps, as is adopting a culture that security is everyone’s responsibility. That culture requires instigating a security-first mindset among teams as well as implementing essential automated security testing tools.

Platform engineering has recently captured interest and is now generating considerable buzz due to its focus on building and operating self-service internal developer platforms (IDPs) for software delivery and life cycle management. The platform is supported by layered services or tools, created and maintained by a dedicated product team, designed to support the needs of software developers by essentially stitching together components to create a frictionless developer experience.

As Gartner says, “Platform engineering is an emerging technology approach that can accelerate the delivery of applications and the pace at which they produce business value.” In fact, Gartner expects “[t]hat by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams as internal providers of reusable services, components and tools for application delivery. Platform engineering will ultimately solve the central problem of cooperation between software developers and operators.”

In that context, platform engineering certainly builds upon the Agile concepts of DevOps and DevSecOps. Looking deeper at DevOps/DevSecOps and platform engineering shows that they both share many characteristics, while they can also be combined in a way that provides greater benefits to organizations that think about them in tandem. It is easy to see the integral link between platform engineering and DevSecOps and the broader infrastructure management landscape. For example,

From an Agile development approach supported by DevOps/DevSecOps and extending now to platform engineering, the end game is all about speeding delivery of high-impact applications with continuous updates that are highly resilient, reliable and secure. Given the synergies and the pressure on organizations to rapidly deliver applications while combatting cyberthreats, any platform engineering effort should ensure that DevOps/DevSecOps plays a central role.

While the term DevOps and, to some extent, DevSecOps, sound a bit dated and irrelevant and could maybe use a new moniker, the evolving role they are certain to play as platform engineering gains a foothold are not to be underestimated.

Filed Under: Blogs, Business of DevOps, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Testing, DevOps Culture, Platform Engineering Tagged With: devsecops, Evolution, Platform, platform engineering