But wait, how many Kubernetes experts do we have? We’ve got an industry-wide shortage of skilled software development and operations talent—and the complexity of cloud native development is exacerbating the problem. We’re not going to hire our way out of this mess!

Skill shortages stymie cloud native innovation

Even non-technical executives now understand the basic benefits of cloud native software. They know it has something to do with Kubernetes pushing out containers, so the resulting applications are more modular and take advantage of elastic cloud infrastructures.

There’s way more to it than that. The cloud native landscape is a beehive of open-source projects for configuration, networking, security, data handling, service mesh – at various maturity stages. There are also hundreds of vendors offering their development, management and support tools atop this ever-moving CN raft.

A developer’s learning curve is steep and continuous, since this year’s stack might no longer be relevant next year. Outsourcing is tough too, when the few consultants with a real knack for cloud native development are busy and expensive.

The only way to sustainably grow is through building cloud native development talent and capabilities from within, following the introduction and maturation of the space, as well as keeping tabs on the vendor and end user community at large.

While the market demand for digital offerings keeps doubling every couple years, IT budgets often get a budget belt-tightening as a reward for managing and scaling so much technology.

Smaller and leaner teams are expected to deliver twice the output with half the people. The need for specialized skill positions only increases as concepts like event-driven architecture, data lakehouses, real-time analytics, and zero-trust security policies turn into production-grade requirements. 

Why platform engineering matters

No matter what target environment they are contributing to, developers still spend most of their time coding within an IDE. Over the years, vendors have tried everything from low-code tools to process toolkits to lower the skills bar, but the pipelines don’t translate into easy wizards. 

Complex open-source tooling, third party service APIs, and code that is being mixed and matched from GitOps-style repos are driving cloud native development teams toward a new platform engineering approach.

Platform engineering practices seek to create shared resources for development environments–encouraging code, component, and configuration reuse. 

Common platform engineering environments can be represented within a self-service internal development portal or an external partner marketplace, often accompanied by concierge-style support or advisory services from an expert team that curates and reviews all elements in the platform.

It’s critical to govern the platform’s self-service policies for access permissions, code, logic, data, and automation at just the right level of control for the business it supports. 

Too much flexibility ends up creating overhead, as diverse stakeholders fail to distinguish between the relative value or usefulness of so many unvalidated and poorly categorized components of the platform.

Too much rigidity in policy design can create the opposite problem, where centralized governance and approval cycles for every element slow down solution delivery and take away the innovative freedom developers crave.

A modern approach to cloud native platform engineering can finally bring the principles of governance, consistency and reuse to the table.

Speedy innovation through infrastructure abstraction

Refreshingly—or maddeningly—there’s no single right way to ‘do’ cloud native. Even Kubernetes is by itself just an abstraction of container orchestration and only one option for going cloud native.

As an open-source movement, the CNCF purposely leaves the future approach open to interpretation by the community. It doesn’t dictate a particular language, or even a specific piece of infrastructure. 

That’s excellent, but it also leaves short-handed dev teams managing complex plumbing and experimenting with integration options, rather than building better functionality. That’s where platform engineering practices can save the day.

The decision to create a platform is a commitment to help developers of varying skill levels abstract away the complexity of underlying cloud native architectures with interfaces and tools atop readily configured environments.

A platform engineering approach must offer ease of use, elimination of toil, and reduced cognitive load for development teams—helping orgs attract and retain the best talent.

The Intellyx Take

Truly innovative ideas that impact customers represent a core competitive differentiator, and should grow from within the enterprise. That’s difficult when the supply of skilled cloud native development resources is constrained.

Fortunately, platform engineering organizations and technology stacks can automate some of the most difficult work of delivering on the needs of API-driven microservices environments.

The post Patch the cloud native development talent gap with platform engineering appeared first on SD Times.

According to the company, platform engineering is the practice of “designing and building self-service capabilities to minimize cognitive load for developers and to enable fast flow software delivery.”

When implemented properly, platform engineering benefits the whole organization, not just development and IT teams. 

About 68% of respondents said that they’ve seen an increase in development velocity since adopting this practice. Forty-two percent said that speed has increased “a great deal.”

Other benefits companies with platform engineering teams are seeing include improved system reliability (60%), greater productivity (59%), and better workflow standards (57%). 

Top priorities for platform engineering teams also align with product management responsibilities. These include increasing awareness of platform capabilities (47% of respondents), setting realistic expectations of the role of the platform team within the company (44%), and following industry trends and keeping up with feature requirements (37%). 

In an economy when layoffs are becoming increasingly common, those with platform engineering experience might have an edge. According to the report, 71% of respondents said their companies plan to hire someone with that qualification over the next 12 months and 53% will do so within the next six months. 

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