I am a technology journalist with three decades of press experience. Primarily I work as a news analysis writer dedicated to a software application development ‘beat’. I have spent much of the last twenty years focusing on open source, analytics & data science, cloud computing, mobile devices & data management.
Software development is elevating. Professional programming practices are elevating to higher levels of abstraction with the introduction of low-code functions, automations and AI-driven tools that enable developers to focus more immediately on user functionality and business value.
But this elevation starts from ground zero, down at the platform level. Logically enough perhaps, we can’t climb upward to these new higher-level programming functions until we create a culture of underlying technologies and tools that will work effectively below decks.In simple terms, platform engineering is all about developer optimization. It means creating a platform team made up of developers & operations specialists across database and system administration pros, plus site reliability engineers and domain specialists who know the business rules and business logic that the applications and data services being created need to serve. The platform team looks to identify common workflow blocks across an organization and weave them together with software toolchains and services that can be integrated into what they hope will become an internal developer platform i.e. a set of so-called standardized “golden paths” that developers can use to get jobs done faster and more effectively. That is the short definition of platform engineering. The longer version details all the developer self-starter kits, security and compliance considerations and other reusable building blocks that software development requires. So important is platform engineering now that the Cloud Native Computing Foundation has now laid down a set of new project-centric certifications for certified cloud-native platform engineers. The CNCF hosts technologies that are widely agreed to be critical components of the global technology infrastructure stack. These include Kubernetes , Prometheus and Envoy and the organization itself has more than 800 members.Trump’s Cabinet: Here Are His Picks For Key Roles—RFK Jr, Doug Burgum, Matt Gaetz And More When the CNCF decides to codify a software development discipline with new certification layers such as these for platform engineering, developers, data scientists and cloud engineers are typically quite interested. “Platform engineering was one of the most successful tracks at our KubeCon + CloudNativeCon developer and practitioner event in Paris earlier this year,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “Much like our GitOps Certified Associate, certifications that address a specific role versus a specific project are a great way to validate knowledge applicable within a large number of projects and products.” Aniszczyk and team say that the CNCF covers many areas within the cloud-native landscape including continuous integration and continuous delivery, observability, developer experience, automation, orchestration and more. The three new certifications now available are: Certified Backstage Associate - Backstage is an infrastructure-level workflow framework for building developer portals with a centralized software catalog. OpenTelemetry Certified Associate for developers. Open Telemetry is the industry standard technology for software tracing, metrics & logs. Kyverno Certified Associate . Kyverno is a policy engine technology used to control Kubernetes with rules that enable or deny resources from being applied to a cloud computing cluster.In related developments, the CNCF has also come forward with its Technology Landscape Radar report, which examines the “production readiness” of multicluster application management and batch, AI and ML computing technologies in the ecosystem. It also used the same data to identify gaps in the ecosystem and launched a set of cloud-native reference architectures from its End User Technical Advisory Board to help address them. For the CNCF Technology Landscape Radar, CNCF partnered with SlashData to survey more than 300 professional developers using cloud-native technologies, including members of CNCF’s end user community, about their experience with multicluster application management and batch processing, AI and ML technologies.The topics and technologies included in the survey were selected by the End User TAB, representing real issues that are top of mind for cloud-native end users. The report evaluated technologies in each space based on their readiness for production use and placed them into one of four categories: adopt, trial, assess and hold. CNCF Graduated technologies ArgoCD and Cilium were considered ready to adopt for multicluster application management. Apache Airflow and CNCF's CubeFS and Kubeflow were also highly rated for batch, AI and ML computing technologies. “Since launching a year ago, the End User TAB has been working tirelessly to amplify the voices of end users and ensure their firsthand experiences and insights drive the future of the cloud native ecosystem,” said Taylor Dolezal, head of ecosystem at CNCF. “By identifying problem areas and creating streamlined approaches for overcoming challenges, the TAB is leaving organizations free to focus on technical innovation and creating amazing products.” While conducting the Technology Radar, the team gathered insight into the difficulties of managing certain aspects of the ecosystem. These challenges stem primarily from the complexity of adopting multi-cluster, multi-cloud, or hybrid deployments and include issues like cost, observability, security and cluster lifecycle across tools, providers and environmentsIt also identified a need for more standardization and interoperability and regular up-levelling of skills to pace with the latest developments in cloud-native technology. To address ecosystem gaps and provide practical guidance and examples for building cloud-native applications, the Reference Architecture working group, a collaborative effort within the End User TAB, has launched its first reference architectures. These real-life architectures, used in large-scale production settings, include how they came to be to provide organizational context essential to understanding the architecture.As potentially paradoxical as it is to suggest that upper-tier software development abstraction starts in the rearview mirror with a concentrated focus on platform engineering, there is no antagonism here. Even though front-end developers are notoriously sceptical of anything they didn’t build themselves or have oversight and insight into , the cloud-native community appears to be quite relaxed about the amount of packaged tooling it is already on the receiving end of. That could well be because almost every technology discussed here is open source, so the transparency factor is maximized. As platform engineering now earns its official stripes, we can only hope that enterprise software stacks will also step up.Our community is about connecting people through open and thoughtful conversations. 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