Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Platform engineering has been one of the hottest keywords in the software community in recent years. As a natural extension of DevOps and the shift-left mentality it fosters, platform engineering is a subfield within software engineering that focuses on building and maintaining tools, workflows, and frameworks that allow developers to build and test their applications efficiently.

Imagine you’re piloting a spaceship through the cosmos, embarking on a thrilling journey to explore the far reaches of the universe. As the captain of this ship, you need a dashboard that displays critical information about your vessel, such as fuel levels, navigation data, and life support systems. This dashboard is your lifeline, providing you with real-time insights about the health and performance of various systems within your ship, so you can quickly make critical decisions.

Organizations are moving to micro-services and container-based architectures because these modern environments enable speed, efficiency, availability, and the power to innovate and scale more quickly. However, when it comes to troubleshooting distributed cloud native applications, teams face a unique set of challenges due to the dynamic and decentralized nature of these systems.

Maybe you’re still using monolithic applications, built and refined over many years. You understand that shifting to microservices or containerized architectures is a huge and daunting task. You’re probably grappling with the limitations of legacy systems—maybe they’re slow, tough to update, or can’t scale as you’d like. And you’re likely using more traditional IT monitoring tools or even some cloud observability tools.

Who is software for? It’s an interesting question, because there’s an obvious answer. It’s for the users, right? If your job is to write software, then it’s implied that the most important thing you should care about is the experience people have when they use your software.