Blockchain technology has transformed the way we think about data and its management. With its decentralized and distributed architecture, it has enabled the creation of various innovative applications across industries.
However, developing and deploying blockchain projects can be challenging due to the complex nature of the technology. This is where DevOps and Platform Engineering come into play. In this context, the State of Development Operations (DevOps) and Platform Engineering are crucial for the success of blockchain projects. In this article, we will explore the importance of DevOps and Platform Engineering in the blockchain ecosystem and how they can help organizations achieve their goals.
What is Platform Engineering?
Platform engineering is a specialized field that designs and constructs toolchains and workflows that allow software engineering organizations to provide self-service capabilities. The goal is to create an integrated product, known as an “Internal Developer Platform,” that covers the operational needs of an application’s entire lifecycle.
An Internal Developer Platform (IDP) is essentially a layer that sits on top of an engineering team’s existing technology and tooling. Its purpose is to help operations organize their setup and enable developer self-service. When done correctly, platform engineering provides golden paths and paved roads that align with the preferred abstraction level of each individual developer who interacts with the IDP layer.
Platform engineering is especially critical in the cloud-native era because it enables organizations to optimize their development and deployment processes. By providing a self-service platform that streamlines these workflows, software engineering teams can focus on building high-quality applications instead of worrying about infrastructure details.
An effective IDP typically includes various tools and capabilities, such as automated testing and deployment, containerization, monitoring, and logging. Platform engineers are responsible for designing and implementing these features and ensuring the IDP is secure, scalable, and easy to use.
To achieve this, platform engineers must have a deep understanding of both software development and infrastructure operations. They must be familiar with modern cloud technologies, toolchains, DevOps practices, and agile methodologies.
Relationship between DevOps and Platform Engineering?
DevOps and platform engineering are closely intertwined in the software development world. While DevOps teams are responsible for creating and implementing workflows, but also need diverse tools to get the job done. Unfortunately, maintaining these tools can drain developer resources, and the lack of knowledge about these tools can delay projects.
This is where platform engineering teams come in. These teams take over the design, implementation, and maintenance of the tools and workflows that developers rely on. By working closely with tool experts and understanding developer needs, platform engineering teams can select the best tools for the job, perform integrations and automation, and troubleshoot issues over time.
The result is a platform that provides greater consistency and productivity to developers without requiring them to have granular knowledge of how the platform operates. By taking care of the details, platform engineering teams allow developers to focus on what they do best: writing code and creating innovative solutions.
But platform engineering is not just about maintaining tools and workflows. It’s also about creating an environment that fosters collaboration and innovation. By working closely with development teams, platform engineers can identify pain points and provide solutions that improve the overall development process.
This collaborative approach is essential in today’s fast-paced world of software development. With so many tools and technologies to choose from, it’s easy for development teams to become overwhelmed. But by partnering with platform engineering teams, they can ensure that they have the tools they need to get the job done without sacrificing productivity or innovation.
How does DevOps provide leverage for Platform Engineering?
DevOps and platform engineering are two essential practices that are closely related and can benefit each other in several ways. Both practices aim to achieve the same goal – delivering high-quality software systems that are reliable, scalable, and efficient.
DevOps practices involve integrating development, testing, and operations processes to create a culture of collaboration, continuous improvement, and automation. By breaking down silos between development and operations, DevOps enables teams to work together more effectively, resulting in faster delivery of software systems with higher quality.
On the other hand, platform engineering is concerned with designing and building platforms that provide a stable and scalable infrastructure for running software applications. Platform engineers are responsible for building and maintaining the underlying infrastructure that supports the software systems, such as the hardware, operating system, networking, and security.
DevOps and platform engineering are closely related because they share common goals and practices. DevOps practices can help platform engineering teams by providing them with the tools and processes needed to build, deploy, and manage complex software systems more efficiently. DevOps enables teams to deliver software quickly and with greater reliability by integrating development, testing, and operations processes.
Furthermore, platform engineering teams can leverage DevOps practices to automate the deployment and management of their platforms, reducing the time and effort required to deploy new software versions. DevOps also enables teams to monitor and analyze system performance, which can help identify and resolve issues more quickly.
DevOps also provides a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement that can help platform engineering teams to innovate and deliver new features and services more quickly. By breaking down silos between development and operations, DevOps creates a culture of collaboration that enables teams to work together more effectively and leverage each other’s skills and expertise.
Why does blockchain development need DevOps?
DevOps combines software development and operations practices to improve the software lifecycle. It enables developers and operations teams to work simultaneously, meeting each other’s requirements. Some DevOps models also incorporate QA and security teams.
Beyond finance, blockchain technology is rapidly gaining popularity, with experts predicting that most Fortune 500 companies will use it by 2022.
DevOps promotes faster development by improving communication between company departments. This is especially vital in blockchain development and writing smart contracts, as it emphasizes customer needs.
DevOps tools automate deployment, saving time and preventing manual coding errors. Additionally, they provide helpful insights for monitoring and analyzing blockchain network operations.
Use cases of DevOps in Platform Engineering
Here are some use cases of DevOps in platform engineering:
- Continuous Integration and Deployment: DevOps practices can help platform engineering teams automate the process of building, testing, and deploying new platform features and updates. This can help reduce the time and effort required to deliver new functionality while improving the quality and reliability of the platform.
- Infrastructure as Code: Platform engineering teams can use DevOps practices to define and manage their infrastructure as code, meaning they can create, deploy, and manage their infrastructure using code. This can help reduce the risk of configuration drift and make it easier to manage and scale the platform.
- Monitoring and Analytics: DevOps practices can help platform engineering teams monitor and analyze their platform’s performance and health in real time. This can help identify and resolve issues quickly and proactively, improving the overall user experience.
- Collaboration and Communication: DevOps practices can improve collaboration and communication between platform engineering teams and other stakeholders, such as developers, QA, and IT operations teams. This can help ensure everyone is aligned on platform requirements and that changes are communicated and implemented effectively.
- Security and Compliance: DevOps practices can help platform engineering teams to build and deploy secure and compliant platforms. This can include automated security testing, compliance checks, and continuous monitoring and improvement.
Blockchain-Based DevOps Platforms
The industry’s growing need for affordable computational resources and infrastructure has led to the emergence of several crypto projects. These projects employ various technologies but share a common feature: using tokens that incentivize community growth and reward the utilization of resources.
Buddy
Buddy is a decentralized DevOps platform that aims to solve the infrastructure problem many DevOps teams face. It offers access to two automation GRIDs that can perform time-intensive and computation-intensive automated actions, allowing teams to work efficiently and without worrying about infrastructure availability. The platform supports complex enterprise-scale applications, multi-cloud workflows, and hybrid environments, making it a versatile tool for DevOps engineers.
Users can create pipelines using the 80 supported automation actions, and more will soon be available thanks to Buddy’s marketplace, which encourages community growth and supports talented developers. Third-party developers can submit their own automation actions to the ecosystem and offer them for sale or for free.
Buddy’s Private Automation GRID is a network of auto-scalable, on-demand infrastructure running on physical infrastructure, private cloud, or IaaS servers. The platform can also use trusted GRIDs its partners provide or SaaS integrations. Depending on the load, Buddy automatically creates new instances and removes them when they are no longer needed.
The Shared Automation GRID is used for time-intensive and computation-intensive tasks and can be given to a network of Buddy instances with available resources. Users who run these instances will get a BUD token for each computed unit.
Buddy’s Sandboxes allows DevOps engineers to remove development bottlenecks by running applications or websites directly from Git repositories in disposable environments. The platform supports integration with various ecosystems and has a built-in Git on which users can base their projects.
The Ethereum-based BUD Token serves as the basis of a decentralized economy and creates positive feedback loops in the Buddy ecosystem. Without tokenization, the platform would lack economic incentives for GRID participation, as fiat payments are too slow and inefficient to power community growth.
Fetch.ai
Fetch.ai is a blockchain-based project that offers a Smart Ledger, a next-generation distributed ledger technology that enables autonomous software agents to sell their data or idle resources to Fetch tokens. This technology can benefit various industries, including DevOps, where it can be used to buy computational resources for testing, monitoring, or other time-intensive tasks.
The benefits of this technology extend beyond DevOps. For instance, IoT devices can sell information that can be useful to other agents. A software agent can relay weather information based on using a vehicle’s windshield wiper. An idle computer can run computations for a remote customer. Additionally, legacy data can be plugged into Fetch and made a marketable asset.
As the Fetch network expands, it will gain massive computational power, allowing its agents to gain new data insights. With the integration of machine-learning technology, the network can create valuable knowledge on its own, enabling the replacement of human middlemen and the development of entirely new industries. The technology allows data and infrastructure to be less dependent on humans and become capable of creating new markets and selling themselves autonomously.
Fetch tokens will serve as the internal currency for all transactions and operations within the network. They will be refundable for certain actions to ensure security and prevent undesirable behavior. Overall, the Fetch technology has the potential to revolutionize various industries and bring about new opportunities for innovation and growth.
Benefits of Platform Engineering in Blockchain
Platform engineering is a critical aspect of blockchain technology, and it plays an essential role in ensuring the security, scalability, and interoperability of blockchain platforms. Here are some of the key benefits of platform engineering in blockchain:
- Scalability: Platform engineering enables blockchain platforms to handle many transactions. By implementing scalable architecture, blockchain platforms can support high transaction volumes without compromising performance and efficiency.
- Interoperability: Blockchain technology is rapidly evolving, and many blockchain platforms are available. Platform engineering helps to ensure that these platforms can interoperate seamlessly, enabling users to transact across different blockchains.
- Security: Blockchain technology is known for its security features, but platform engineering is necessary to ensure these features are implemented correctly. This includes encryption, access control, and authentication measures to prevent unauthorized access and tampering.
- Efficiency: Platform engineering can also help improve blockchain platforms’ efficiency by optimizing the use of resources such as storage, processing power, and bandwidth.
- Innovation: By enabling faster and more efficient development of blockchain platforms, platform engineering can help drive innovation in the blockchain industry, creating new products and services.
Examples of enterprises using DevOps in Platform Engineering
Amazon
Before moving to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon struggled to predict and meet traffic demands, resulting in a large amount of unused server capacity and wasted money. However, with AWS, engineers could incrementally scale capacity up or down, reducing spending on server capacity and allowing for a transition to a continuous deployment process.
As a result, engineers could deploy code every 11.7 seconds on average, leading to reduced outages and increased revenue. This agile approach allowed for greater efficiency and flexibility in managing server capacity and deploying code.
Netflix
When Netflix shifted from DVD rentals to online video streaming, it encountered uncharted territory without any commercial tools to keep its cloud infrastructure running smoothly. As a solution, the company turned to open-source solutions, rallying the help of hundreds of developers to create the Simian Army, an automated suite of tools that stress tests Netflix’s infrastructure to proactively identify and resolve vulnerabilities before impacting customers.
Today, Netflix engineers deploy code thousands of times daily, showcasing the company’s continued commitment to automation and open source. This year, Netflix was unanimously awarded the JAX Special Jury Award for its impressive adoption and implementation of new technologies into its DevOps approach.
Facebook has had a significant impact on the way we approach software development. Early on, it adopted principles such as code ownership, incremental changes, automation, and continuous improvement, aligning closely with the DevOps philosophy.
As Facebook’s approach has evolved, it has recently migrated its entire infrastructure and back-end IT to the Chef configuration management platform, with some of its cookbooks made available to the public. Its accelerated development lifecycle has set new consumer expectations for software, with bi-weekly app updates signal constant, rapid refreshes are now the norm. Companies that cannot keep up with these demands risk being left behind in the fast-paced world of software development.
Adobe
Five years ago, Adobe faced the challenge of transitioning from packaged software to a cloud services model. This required a continuous stream of small software updates rather than big, semi-annual releases. To maintain this pace, Adobe turned to CloudMunch’s DevOps platform to automate and manage its deployments.
The platform integrates with various software tools, allowing developers to continue using their preferred tools. Its multi-project view lets developers see how changes to one Adobe product affect others. This transition has resulted in faster delivery, better product management, and an impressive 60% increase in app development demand met, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Walmart
Walmart has struggled to compete with Amazon in the online retail space, but it established WalmartLabs in 2011 to drive its technology innovation and development efforts. The arm has taken a DevOps approach to its mission, incorporating OneOps cloud-based technology to automate and accelerate application deployment.
WalmartLabs has also developed several open-source tools, including Hapi, a Node.js framework that simplifies application and service building, allowing developers to focus on reusable application logic instead of infrastructure.
Recently, it deployed over 100,000 OpenStack cores to build its private cloud and continues to refine its agile approach, enabling Walmart to make significant strides in closing the online gap with Amazon.
Platform Engineering’s next steps
Numerous organizations have adopted Platform Engineering to tackle new engineering challenges brought about by the emergence of microservices, container orchestration, and related technologies. Platform Engineering teams have been formed to handle these responsibilities.
The main objective of Platform Engineering is to improve the developer experience and productivity by implementing self-service features, automated infrastructure operations, and reusable tools. This is achieved through the use of configurable and reusable application components and services.
Users benefit from standardized, automated tools, components, and processes, which are easily accessible through self-service features. Platform Engineering ensures that the technology approach is optimized for the best results and that developers have the necessary resources to create and deploy applications efficiently.
Conclusion
In conclusion, companies like Facebook, Adobe, and Walmart have used Platform Engineering practices to improve their development capabilities and meet customer demand. As blockchain technology continues to evolve, it provides a new opportunity for businesses to automate further and streamline their engineering processes.
Using smart contracts on distributed ledgers, platform engineering can be better supported, providing companies with a secure and efficient platform to build their applications. Thus, Platform Engineering remains an important tool for businesses in the digital age.
