Hello everyone and welcome back to the Cognixia podcast. we visit two very popular terms of our times – Platform engineering and DevOps, and we will explore not just what they are but also, more importantly, how they are different from each other because we understand it can get a little confusing at times. In the fast-moving, modern software development and operations world, terms like DevOps, platform engineering, and Site Reliability Engineering are so commonly thrown around, sometimes even used interchangeably, that it can be hard to keep up and navigate these different domains smoothly. The distinction between these terms is quite nuanced and quite critical to understand, we believe. So that is what we will focus on in today’s episode.

In essence, platform engineering, DevOps, and site reliability engineering or SRE are related but they are distinct disciplines by themselves and do not mean the same thing. They all play varying roles in the development and operation of reliable and scalable software systems but they are quite different from each other. Let us first take a quick look at what each of these terms means.

To begin with, DevOps. DevOps is a cultural and collaborative approach to software development and IT operations with a focus on breaking the silos between the two functions while improving communication, collaboration, and efficiency. It is not a specific job role as such but more like a cultural philosophy for teams and organizations to follow. It revolves around the idea of encouraging developers to take on greater operational responsibilities and for operations teams to be more involved in the development process. It involves a lot of different tools and practices like CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, Infrastructure-as-Code, etc.