The Industry Cloud Platform Paradigm

Industry cloud platform is an emerging trend across industry verticals as they create value for organizations by offering packaged business capabilities, accelerate time to value & leverages the benefit from cross-industry innovations.

Industry cloud platforms propel a cloud platform into a business platform.

A platform creates value by facilitating exchanges between two or more interdependent groups, usually consumers and producers.- create the means of connection.

Platforms are a means of centralizing expertise, while decentralizing innovation to the customer or user.

Why Do we need an Industry Cloud Platform

To meet the specific needs of vertical industry segments inadequately served by generic solutions.

Enabling you to drive business transformation profitably and sustainably

Position / reposition the business for the unknown future

Manage business disruption and changes

Industry clouds are popular, and their use is growing. In fact, a recent Deloitte analysis found industry clouds could become a $640 billion market by 2024

Industry Cloud Platform — Core Components

1. Cloud Services(IaaS, PaaS)
2. Technology / Digital Platform Engineering ( Self-service APIs, tools, services)
3. Packaged Business Capabilities / Workflows / APIs as SaaS
4. Data Fabrics
5. Composable Architecture

a. API First

b. Just-in-time orchestration binding

What is Technology / Digital Platform Engineering?

A *digital platform* is a foundation of self-service APIs, tools, services, knowledge and support which are arranged as a compelling internal product. Autonomous delivery teams can make use of the platform to deliver product features at a higher pace, with reduced co-ordination.”

• Evan Bottcher

If you are embarking on “Industry cloud”(combine SaaS, PaaS and IaaS with tailored, industry-specific functionality that organizations can use to more easily adapt to the relentless stream of disruptions in their industry) journey, then the Platform engineering might underpin it.

Importance of Technology Platform Engineering

1. Basically it’s a tool chain, process, guidelines aligned and proofed tutorial to give teams an answer to the question: “How shall we do this ?”
2. Reduce the cognitive burden on developers and allow them to get more done
3. Platform team as just another type of enablement team to help aligned teams to get things done.

4. Accelerate the Value Delivery

a. Self service Capabilities

b. Automation

5. Helps to manage the cross cutting concerns

a. Security/Authentication

b. Observability — Logs / Traces / Metrics

6. A platform should also be more than just software and APIs — it is documentation, and consulting, and support and evangelism, and templates and guidelines.

7. It increases team velocity without increasing developer burnout.

8. Platforms don’t enforce a specific toolset or approach — it is about making it easy for developers to build and deliver software while not abstracting away useful and differentiated capabilities of the underlying core services

9. Consistent Governance, Continuous resilience

10. End of the day it’s for Developer Enablement!!

11. DevEx is enhanced when platforms provide golden paths. A golden path is an opinionated and supported path to build something.

Where Did Technology Platform Engineering Come from?

1. Platform engineering looks to break down more cross-organizational silos and duplicate work
2. DevOps looks to create application teams that are able to build, test, release, maintain and operate a single domain. But, the further down the stack you go, you’ll find a lot of cross-company duplicate effort. Because application teams were built to more rapidly deliver value to end users — not to learn how to orchestrate Containers, to spin up multi-cloud environments or to worry about security and compliance.
3. The platform engineering team sits on the horizontal, serving cross-company needs so the vertical application teams’ can serve their end users. It focuses on enabling an application team to get up and running without the cognitive overload and overlap of each team learning to be cloud native.
4. One of the goals of platform engineering is to promote self-service to enhance developer velocity and free them from being dependent on people and processes to do their job — David Melamed

What’s DevOps versus Tech Platform Engineering versus Site Reliability Engineering?

DevOps — the bringing together of development and operations — is the practice of breaking up monolithic architecture and teams, in order to create smaller, autonomous teams that can build, deliver and run whole applications.

Platform engineering is the discipline of abstracting out any infrastructure or toil that distracts from DevOps teams delivering their domain.

Site reliability engineering or SRE teams are dedicated to helping both the DevOps and internal platform teams by increasing reliability, scalability and, often, security.

DevOps focuses on the development side

SRE focuses on the operations side,

and Platform engineering focuses on internal developer enablement.

Internal Developer Portal vs Internal Developer Platform

Gartner says

“Internal developer portals serve as the interface through which developers can discover and access internal developer platform capabilities”

While Internal Developer Platforms remove toil and repetitive work, dedicated developer portals provide a UI with service catalog capabilities that developers can use to access the underlying IDP. This is a subtle but extremely important differentiation

References

1. https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/what-are-industry-cloud-platforms
2. https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/consulting/solutions/industry-cloud-solutions.html
3. https://www.sap.com/india/industries/industry-cloud.html
4. https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/blog/deloitte-on-cloud-blog/2022/industry-cloud-benefits-and-challenges.html