This chapter covers
- Understanding platforms and why we need them
- Building a platform on top of Kubernetes
- Introducing a “walking skeleton” application
Platform engineering is not a new term in the tech industry. But it is quite new in the cloud-native space and the context of Kubernetes. We were not using the term in the cloud-native communities when I started writing this book back in 2020. However, by the time of writing this book (2023), platform engineering had become the new hot topic in cloud-native and Kubernetes communities. This book aims to go on a journey to explore what platforms are and why you would use Kubernetes, and more specifically, the Kubernetes APIs at the core, to build a platform and enable your internal teams to deliver software more efficiently.
To understand why platform engineering became a trend in the industry, you first need to understand the cloud native and Kubernetes ecosystems. Because this book assumes that you are already familiar with Kubernetes, containers, and cloud-native applications, we will focus on describing the challenges you will face when architecting, building, and running these applications on top of Kubernetes and cloud providers. We will take a developer-focused approach, meaning that most of the topics covered are tackled in a way that relates to developers’ day-to-day tasks and how a myriad of tools and frameworks in the cloud-native space will affect them.