From Silos to DevOps to Platform Engineering: embracing GitOps and going behind the hype

A presentation at Codemotion Madrid in in Madrid, Spain by Horacio Gonzalez

In today’s fast-paced and ever-evolving technological landscape, organizations face the challenge of breaking down traditional silos and adopting collaborative practices to drive innovation and achieve operational excellence. The journey begins with embracing DevOps principles, which emphasize communication, collaboration, and automation between development and operations teams. However, DevOps deals with the relation between Devs and Ops, and stakeholders’ needs, in the form of corporate policies, governance and constraints, remain external to the process. By embracing Platform Engineering, organizations can establish a unified platform that empowers developers, operations teams, and stakeholders to work together seamlessly and accelerate the delivery of high-quality software. In this talk, we’ll embark on a journey from DevOps to GitOps and finally to Platform Engineering, elucidating each step with clear definitions, case studies, and real-world applications. We’ll dissect the elements that connect these practices and illuminate how they collaboratively enhance the software development process. As we focus to Platform Engineering, we’ll explore its ability to transcend the capabilities of DevOps and GitOps, an integrated, solution that accommodates diverse stakeholder requirements, corporate policies, and governance constraints. We’ll touch on the technical aspects of implementing a unified platform, its potential for enhancing collaboration, and the role of automation.