Cloud Hosting

You may have heard about platform engineering, a new term adding itself to the already crowded set of roles in the development and DevOps world.

In this post, well cover platform engineering, how it differs from DevOps, why you might consider investing into platform engineering, and who needs platform engineering skills.

Platform engineering is the process of designing, building, and maintaining workflows and tools for software engineering organizations to drive consistency and speed up common tasks.

In addition, many platform engineers maintain an integrated software product called an internal developer portal, which consolidates data and knowledge fragmented across clouds, tools and teams so everyone in the engineering organization can discover essential information about their applications, services and infrastructure in one self-serve place.

Platform engineering is a new field that has arisen to meet the growing complexity of distributed software development. As software development has started involving more tools, clouds and workflows, its become increasingly difficult for software developers who are now asked to manage more different aspects that go into writing robust, secure, performant and capable applications.

Platform engineering arose to help software developers manage the complexity of developing their applications. While DevOps aspires to automate deployment and the end-to-end running of applications, in practice, this is only achievable by the largest and most talented organizations.

In reality, when organizations remove operations and implement DevOps, specific DevOps antipatterns appear. We can see some of these antipatterns in reviewing various State of DevOps reports. For example, one study shows a clustering effect where the top-performing organizations have succeeded at a you build it, you run it approach. However, the other cluster is where this pattern fails, and these organizations suffer from the following antipattern.

Platform engineering is a new field that has arisen to meet the growing complexity of distributed software development.

Senior developers often take on the role of a shadow ops organization, so the best development resources, the ones that cost the most and are better used for increasing speed and quality within the development team are unable to do the job the company hired them to do because theyre now spending their time covering live operations and other operations-related tasks like service creation.

This leads to fragmentation of ops across the organization, often with varying degrees of quality, and it depends on the amount of time the senior developer could devote to setting it up and maintaining it.

What differentiates successful organizations from those that are not? The most successful had an internal team that is responsible for an internal development portal that supports the development teams. These dedicated teams allowed delivery teams to focus on creating functional software features, not on managing dependencies, pipelines and tools.

One issue when adopting platform engineering is the tendency to build another silo. A good example would be a ticketing system where users can request features or report bugs, the requests go into the platform engineering realm, and are eventually resolved. You can combat this by focusing on enabling users to self-serve their own needs with your portal by providing accurate and relevant documentation, training sessions and pairing with users to solve their problems.

Another issue is prioritizing the right things. There are a lot of users from many different parts of your organization, so having a single feature request pipeline for those things users cannot self-serve with a committee deciding on priority is essential to servicing the needs of your organization effectively.

Keep your platform team adaptable and not stuck in the past ways of doing things. With the rapid pace of change in IT, its hard to keep up. Enablement is one way you can ease the burden on your team, but also allowing your team a consistent amount of time to train on new technologies is another.

Platform engineers are responsible for deploying, and maintaining the internal development portal. They also work with a variety of stakeholders to ensure that the portal meets its users needs.

Platform engineers typically have a deep understanding of software engineering practices and how software engineers work. In addition, platform engineers understand what the organization is attempting to deliver and the tools and workflows needed to accomplish those goals. They also have experience with a variety of DevOps tools and practices.

While a successful platform engineer needs to understand software development and DevOps tools and practices, they also need to be able to work effectively with people. Platform engineering is a team sport. They need to be able to communicate with stakeholders from all parts of the organization, from the C-suite to junior developers.

They also need to be comfortable with change. Platforms, DevOps and software engineering are constantly evolving, and the flexibility to adapt to new technologies and approaches is probably the most important skill theyll need.

Platform engineering is closely related to DevOps. Many platform engineers come from a DevOps background. DevOps is a set of practices that help businesses deliver software faster and more efficiently. It emphasizes collaboration between development and operations teams.

Platform engineering borrows many of the same principles from DevOps, including automation, continuous delivery and continuous integration.

Platform engineering differs from DevOps in that platform engineering builds the tools to help engineers and DevOps perform their tasks. Tool creation is generally not a focus for DevOps, or if tools are created, its done on an ad hoc basis.

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is another closely related field. Like platform engineering, SRE focuses on the availability and performance of software systems. SRE practitioners are often responsible for monitoring and responding to incidents. They also work with developers to prevent outages from happening in the first place. However, platform engineers are more focused on development, while SRE practitioners focus more on operations.

If your organization is developing software, theres a good chance youll need platform engineering skills to help accelerate your software development teams. Integrated development platforms are becoming more and more common, and theyre being used to help some of the most disruptive and adaptable software development teams in the world expedite their work.

Platform engineering is a team sport.

Platform engineering is something to consider for all organizations thinking about implementing DevOps. As businesses strive to deliver software faster, they need processes and engineers who can enable their software development teams, not hinder them.

The DevOps antipatterns are something to keep in mind while making your decisions. First, ask yourself if you can execute DevOps successfully. If not, then an internal developer portal and platform engineering may be the right choice for you.

An internal developer portal is a self-service application and data store that lets developers and managers track and organize everything their engineering teams build and operate.

First off, the catalog consolidates data and knowledge fragmented across clouds, tools and teams so everyone in an organization can discover essential information about their applications, services and infrastructure in one place.

This provides a variety of utility to organizations:

Platform engineering teams can build or buy internal developer portals. Building affords maximum flexibility to tailor the solution to the organizations needs; however, the level of effort associated with building and maintaining it negates the value entirely unless youre a mega-cap company. There are open source projects, including Backstage and Gimlet. The first is a DIY portal, and therefore organizations will still be required to invest heavily to attain value. Gimlet focuses on Kubernetes-based environments.

Ready-to-use internal developer portals are rapidly increasing in popularity. Configure8 is an increasingly popular option because of its end-to-end awareness of services and infrastructure, not just Kubernetes, and its advanced analytics.

Next, some platform engineering teams choose to add scaffolding services to their offering. The scaffolder consists of templates that make it simple for developers to spin up new services. This makes it easier for developers to properly launch new production services adhering to organizational standards while enjoying flexibility when needed. Scaffolders can then register the new services and related tools in the catalog so its always up to date.

If your organization is developing software, theres a good chance youll need platform engineering skills to help accelerate your software development teams.

Scaffolders are sometimes included with universal catalogs, and they can also be created separately alongside catalogs. In this case, blueprints created in a scaffolder are then merchandised inside the enterprises catalog solution via a plugin integration.

In terms of standalone tools, there are a number of open source scaffolders, such as Cookiecutter and Yeoman, and standalone commercial software solutions like Humanitec.

Its important to consider how often your enterprise will actually be creating new services versus managing and improving the existing system as you consider the relative priority of your platform engineering investments.

Finally, some platform engineering teams are investing in making it simpler to manage their infrastructure. The more infrastructure you have, across many accounts and clouds, the more value your organization will get from integrated management capabilities. These capabilities may enable you to change the size of an instance, provision different types of storage or resize Kubernetes clusters.

Many teams have invested in Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solutions such as Cloudformation and Terraform and would run changes through their normal update process while others may want a simple way to deep link into the resources running a service from within the catalog of their IDP. Much like with scaffolding, platform engineering teams should consider the frequency of these types of changes, compatibility with their IaC investments, and the number of users in the overall engineering team affected by these scenarios when planning their investments.

There are a variety of other tools and applications available for platform engineering. Here are some of the most popular ones:

Orchestration:

These are just a few of the tools and applications available for platform engineers. Platform engineering is an emerging field, so expect more tools to enter the market.

As distributed cloud systems become more commonly used and architectural patterns continue to evolve, the demand for platform engineers and internal developer portals is expected to grow.

See original here:

Platform Engineering: What Is It and Who Does It? - thenewstack.io

CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Mr. SuryaNarayanan PaneerSelvam, Co-Founder at Skill-lync.

One thing led to another, it was after Sarang and I completed our Masters, we realised that whatever we had learned during graduation did not help us land a job, or even keep up with our Masters coursework. This pushed us to find a solution that would make it easy for other graduating engineers to skill-up, and become more employable.

We started creating small videos on YouTube during our post-graduation and tested multiple learning modules. By 2015, we started selling our courses to US colleges, providing value-added courses, as well as started conducting live sessions. Once the colleges started to pay, we realised that there is a potential in the market which led us to collaborate with about 12 colleges from Chennai, who paid around Rs 5,000 for each student. By the end of 2015, we had more than 300 students with us. Both Sarang and I decided to quit our jobs then and return to India to focus on building Skill-Lync.

However, now, amid COVID-19 we have partnered with more than 50 colleges and corporations to provide these courses.Our mission is aligned with the Govt. of Indias clarion call of building a skilled economy as there is a shortage of high-quality engineering talent in the country that can help India ride the next industrial wave. There is a need for credible platforms such as ours created on the back of academia and the industry to ensure that the students garner the right skill set to work on the next-gen, disruptive automotive technology.

Today, we have collaborated with more than 300 colleges and corporations to provide these courses. Skill-lyncs mission is aligned with the Govt of Indias clarion call of building a skilled economy as there is a shortage of high-quality engineering talent in the country that can help India ride the next industrial wave.

2. How does it help engineering students become industry ready?

Skill-Lync has been able to establish itself as a credible partner for organisations looking at building an upskilled talent pool. We have exclusive paths to get students trained in cutting-edge content upskilling for high-quality jobs. Students from more than 80 countries have enrolled on Skill-Lync, including geographies such as the U.S., UK, UAE, Germany, Australia, Canada among others with more than 300 corporates partnerships such as Cyient, Renault-Nissan Technology Business Center India (RNTBCI), TATA Elxsi, Expleo, Segula Technologies to provide job offers to engineering students after the completing the course.

Additionally, Skill-Lync has been on an upward growth trajectory regardless of the pandemic, offering solutions that cater to the upskilling and reskilling aspect, hence it augments the skills needed for engineers to stay relevant in accordance to latest technological disruption across industries.

3. What are the other sectors you feel needs upskilling?

In a country like India having 1.3 billion population, upskilling is required in almost all sectors but mostly it is required in education, tech sectors, healthcare , BFSI, IT, retail and so on. The need for employees to constantly upskill has only steadily increased especially after Covid-19. The lockdown has turned into a necessity because of the sudden rise in online platforms offering upskilling courses.

4. Will Skill-Lync look at expanding its sectors beyond the engineering sector?

We want to dive deep into the engineering sector first and make Skill-Lync a top platform for all engineering sectors that can provide upskilling courses to make students industry ready. There are a few industries which might be our next focus point when it comes to upskilling, but at the moment, we are only looking at core engineering.

5. How has the brand grown over the years?

Over the years, Skill-Lync has expanded globally. The platform till now has upskilled over 30,000 students from 80 countries across India, Middle East, North Africa A (South East Asia), the US, Canada, Australia and Europe. Since inception, we have seen growth, and we want to bring robust results for the next two quarters to work toward our growth playbook. Till now the company has partnered with 350 companies, including Nissan, Renault, Mahindra, and Tata Elxsi, for student placements. If I talk about the target, we want to see 30% of revenue coming from other geographies within the next two years, which currently is at 12%. Covid19 has pushed many more students to look at online resources to skill & upskill themselves. We saw a 20% uptick concerning student interests.

6. How is the company making a dent in Indias $15 billion edtech industry?

There are several driving factors that have helped Skill-Lync stand out in a deeply cluttered ed-tech market. We operate within the higher education segment of the edtech industry that has seen a 75% increase in its user base, with the market size now comparable to other subdivisions such as K-12. Within higher education, Skill-Lync has carved a niche for itself wherein we are reimagining the Indian engineering education ecosystem. Our demand is augmented by the fact that despite being the 4th most opted domain at the undergraduate level in the country, the engineering curriculum & the institutions have a disconnect between what the industry demands and what the students are being taught.

7. Why is there a need to embrace upskilling in the world

The lockdown resulted in a sudden rise in online platforms offering upskilling courses. Many businesses have adopted new trends requiring frequent updates, particularly during the pandemic, encouraging people to upskill and re-skill to stand out.

For instance, the automotive industry is going through a significant change, driven by sustainability and an increasing base of conscious consumers. In addition to our coursework, we offer first-hand experience of building engineering models from scratch, thus providing a holistic view of the future of the automotive industry. Our main goal was to help the students gain insights into the future of the automotive industry which not only helps them understand challenges but provide the experience in making real products. A team of 10 students and technical engineers had built a full-scale in-house SUV prototype called -Lyncer S1. With this SUV creation, our only aim was to give more practical and hands-on knowledge to the students.

8. What are some of the benefits for Skill-Lync students?

Our courses are designed to make engineers industry-ready across core engineering domains such as mechanical, electrical, civil, computer science, electronics and biomedical engineering. We do a complete industry mapping, identifying the market gaps and the roles that corporates are looking to fill and empanel experts from Fortune 500 companies curating courses that are project-driven, thus offering deep engineering expertise to the students. We provide mock interviews for students before they face the industry experts for the job. We customise our curriculum to meet the learning outcomes that are specially curated as per the industry demand. We have built an in-house Electric Vehicle to help its students gain insights into the future of the automotive industry. The vehicle was built by a team of 6 in-house experts at Skill-Lync in collaboration with professionals allowing students to gain first-hand experience in building EV and EV prototypes independently.

See the article here:

How Skill-Lync is shaping the engineering future in India - CXOToday.com

Heart disease is a leading cause of death worldwide, and catching it early can make a significant difference for prevention of future cardiovascular events. But in many places, there is limited accessibility to technology that can detect early signs of the disease, such as coronary artery calcification (CAC), when the flow of blood through the arteries is blocked by a buildup of plaque, increasing the likelihood of a heart attack.

Currently, detecting CAC requires CT scans which are costly, deliver large doses of radiation, and must be done in a hospital setting but UC Santa Cruz Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Shiva Abbaszadeh is developing a solution that will make this preventative health care much more accessible. With a new $2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, Abbaszadeh and her collaborator at Stanford University Assistant Professor of Radiology Adam Wang will develop new technology for detecting CAC that can be easily incorporated into routine chest x-rays, the most common medical imaging procedure.

Having an x-ray system that is easily portable can make a huge difference for some areas that might not have access to CT scans because they need a hospital environment, Abbaszadeh said. We can advance material decomposition and lesion differentiation of x-ray imaging.

The novel technology will be an advanced, dual-layer x-ray detector, producing both a traditional image of the body as well as a material-specific image which, in this case, would detect calcium. Wangs team will develop artificial intelligence algorithms to automatically detect and quantify how much calcium is present. The technology will be a drop-in solution for existing clinical procedures and doesnt require any additional radiation or scan time.

While the researchers will initially focus on CAC detection, they believe their system could be used for early detection of lung and breast cancer, tuberculosis, and other diseases.

We are developing a technology platform by combining innovations in materials science, radiation detection, circuit design, and computation to bring new capabilities to x-ray imaging, Abbaszadeh said. One application is what weve targeted coronary artery calcification but the problem is much bigger and can have a wide impact.

To create the next-generation technology for x-ray imaging, Abbaszadeh and her students will utilize the equipment in her lab at the Baskin School of Engineering to engineer the optical and electrical properties of chalcogenide material materials that contain one or more chalcogen elements. This facility, which is dedicated to developing detectors based on chalcogenide alloys of the element selenium, is the only such facility in a research setting in the country to Abbaszadeh and Wangs knowledge.

A dedicated facility for detector development presents a wide range of research opportunities for Abbaszadehs lab, as the material has properties that are well-suited for both photodetectors, used for applications ranging from medical imaging to high-energy physics.

This collaborative project will provide exciting opportunities for students in the two researchers groups to be part of a larger learning environment in which they can visit each other's labs and gain experience with all facets of their technology, including hardware engineering, AI development, and the clinical setting in which their work will be put to use.

Wang and Abbaszadeh will also collaborate with researchers at the Stanford School of Medicine, who will provide input on how to best design their systems for use in the clinical setting and provide images from real instances of CAC to train Wangs AI models. Former Stanford instructor Martin Willemink and Stanford Professor Dominik Fleischmann provided input into the development of the project, and Fleischmann, who is the director of Stanfords cardiovascular imaging division, will continue to lend his expertise. They will also collaborate with industry partners to demonstrate the performance of the new system.

Between the detector physics that Shivas working on, and the artificial intelligence algorithms we're developing at Stanford, were providing better image input information but also we will have algorithms that automatically detect and quantify how much calcium there is, Wang said. Its an improvement on multiple fronts.

Go here to read the rest:

Electrical engineer will develop next-generation x-ray technology for accessible preventative healthcare - University of California, Santa Cruz