Ask HN: What is the difference between DevOps and platform engineering?

1 pointneilrbanerjee1 comment

For the life of me I can't figure out where one starts and the other ends. I keep hearing stuff about how devops is decentralized and platform engineering is centralized, but isn't platform engineering just a return to the pre-devops way of doing things then with a fancier name?

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In my view at least, DevOps is more of a philosophy, whereas platform engineering is a specific, integrated approach in the spirit of that philosophy.

The former is about keeping a tight and integrated loop between development and operations.

Platform engineering is about developing a specific platform to expose to developers which should embrace that goal and offer tangible benefits to both developers and operations specialists, making it easier for them to iterate, share information and automate processes.

In reality, there is always some level of disconnect and tension between the two, but the point is to develop tooling and automation to close that gap as much as possible.

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