{"id":55885,"date":"2024-10-24T09:00:55","date_gmt":"2024-10-24T13:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sdtimes.com\/?p=55885"},"modified":"2024-10-23T15:25:46","modified_gmt":"2024-10-23T19:25:46","slug":"hcl-devops-streamlines-development-processes-with-its-platform-centric-approach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sdtimes.com\/devops\/hcl-devops-streamlines-development-processes-with-its-platform-centric-approach\/","title":{"rendered":"HCL DevOps streamlines development processes with its platform-centric approach"},"content":{"rendered":"

Platform engineering has been gaining quite a lot of traction lately \u2014 and for good reason. The benefits to development teams are many, and it could be argued that platform engineering is a natural evolution of DevOps, so it\u2019s not a huge cultural change to adapt to.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

According to Jonathan Harding, Senior Product Manager of Value Stream Management at HCLSoftware, in an era where organizations have become so focused on how to be more productive, this discipline has gained popularity because \u201cit gets new employees productive quickly, and it gets existing employees able to deliver quickly and in a way that is relatively self-sufficient.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Platform engineering teams work to build an internal developer portal (IDP), which is a self-service platform that developers can use to make certain parts of their job easier. For example, rather than a developer needing to contact IT and waiting for them to provision infrastructure, that developer would interact with the IDP to get that infrastructure provisioned.<\/span><\/p>\n

Essentially, an IDP is a technical implementation of a DevOps objective, explained Chris Haggan, Head of HCL DevOps at HCLSoftware.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDevOps is about collaboration and agility of thinking, and platform engineering is the implementation of products like HCL DevOps that enable that technical delivery aspect,\u201d Haggan said.<\/span><\/p>\n

Haggan looks at platform engineering from the perspective of having a general strategy and then bringing in elements of DevOps to provide a holistic view of that objective.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI want to get this idea that a customer has given me out of the ideas bucket and into production as quickly as I can. And how do I do that? Well, some of that is going to be about the process, the methodology, and the ways of working to get that idea quickly through the delivery lifecycle, and some of that is going to be about having a technical platform that underpins that,\u201d said Haggan.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

IDPs typically include several different functionalities and toolchains, acting as a one-stop shop for everything a developer might need. From a single platform, they might be able to create infrastructure, handle observability, or set up new development environments. The benefits are similar in HCL DevOps, but by coming in a ready-to-use, customizable package, development teams don\u2019t have to go through the process of developing the IDP and can skip right to the benefits.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Haggan explained that the costs of building and maintaining a platform engineering system are not inconsequential. For instance, they need to integrate multiple software delivery systems and figure out where to store metrics, SDLC events, and other data, which often requires setup and administration of a new database.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Plus, sometimes teams design a software delivery system that incorporates their own culture nuances, which can sometimes be helpful, but other times \u201cthey reflect unnecessary cultural debt that has accumulated within an organization for years,\u201d said Haggan.<\/span><\/p>\n

HCL DevOps consists of multifaceted solutions, with the three most popular being:<\/span><\/p>\n