Platform engineers have become a critical role in modern software development, creating and maintaining the foundational infrastructure that supports software development and deployment. Unsurprisingly, platform engineers face a wide range of challenges, from creating robust continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines to keeping complex cloud infrastructure up and running. To effectively address these challenges, a platform engineer needs the right set of tools. In 2024, there are more tools available than ever, which begs the question: which tools to choose?
In this article, we’ll explore the top tools helping platform engineers solve problems. We'll examine tools across various categories, including infrastructure as code (IaC), containerization, CI/CD, security, monitoring, and internal developer platforms (IDPs). For each tool, we'll discuss its core functionality, how it addresses key pain points, and its pros and cons. Whether you're a seasoned platform engineer looking to further optimize your toolbelt or a business leader seeking to provide better support for your platform engineering team, this article will provide insights into the best platform engineering tools in 2024.
What is platform engineering?
Platform engineering focuses on designing, building, and maintaining the infrastructure and tools that support software development and deployment. The goal of platform engineering is to provide a reliable, cohesive, and scalable platform that enables development teams to build, test, and deploy software applications with minimal overhead and friction. Platform engineering is often confused with DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE). While all three disciplines share similar goals around improving software quality and delivery using automations and metrics, platform engineers focus on creating the foundational infrastructure to support disciplines like DevOps and SRE. DevOps focuses on creating a culture of collaboration across development and operations, whereas SRE seeks to improve system reliability.
Platform engineering has become a crucial role in software development, offering several key benefits. First and foremost, platform engineering separates application and infrastructure concerns, allowing developers to focus on coding instead of infrastructure intricacies. This separation accelerates the development process while simultaneously improving software quality, as software developers have less cognitive overhead to deal with. Platform engineering also boosts productivity with self-service tools and automation of routine tasks, which reduces bottlenecks and streamlines developer workflows. Overall, the platform engineers optimize costs by cutting unnecessary expenses and using infrastructure resources efficiently.
Platform engineers are generally responsible for:
- Architecting and implementing on-premise systems and/or cloud infrastructure
- Developing and managing CI/CD pipelines
- Orchestrating containers
- Creating automations for routine tasks
- Providing self-service capabilities for developers
- Troubleshooting and fixing infrastructure issues
- Monitoring system health and performance
Challenges in platform engineering
As a result of the multi-faceted nature of their role, platform engineers face a wide range of common challenges. It’s important to understand these challenges to make the best decision around tooling. Platform engineers commonly face the following challenges.
Infrastructure complexity
Platform engineers must create infrastructure that is consistent across development, testing, and production environments. Additionally, seamless integration between cloud and on-premise requirements is often required. In any case, platform engineers are routinely tasked with managing large, complex system architectures.
Scalability and performance
Efficient system scaling while maintaining high performance under variable loads is a constant challenge for platform engineers. They must implement effective auto-scaling mechanisms without over-provisioning or straining resources. As systems grow larger and more complex, maintaining consistent performance becomes increasingly difficult.
Security and compliance
In today’s rapidly changing security landscape, platform engineers must maintain strict security and compliance standards without impeding development efforts. This involves managing secrets, access controls, and authentication, while also staying up to date with emerging security threats and vulnerabilities. Regulations, such as GDPR and HIPAA, increase the complexity even further.
Continuous integration and delivery
Platform engineers are responsible for creating CI/CD pipelines that are robust, highly available, and promote rapid deployment while maintaining software quality. This often involves managing complex dependencies, versioning interconnected software components, and implementing effective testing strategies. On top of all of this, platform engineers must ensure that their CI/CD processes can scale to handle multiple projects and teams, while accommodating for different development methodologies and tool preferences.
Monitoring and observability
As if designing and creating complex systems architectures wasn’t difficult enough, platform engineers must also implement monitoring and observability capabilities. These monitoring and observability tools often interact with a range of services and components, spread across multiple cloud providers and on-premise systems, which can create more complexity. The massive volume of logs, metrics, and traces generated by the tooling can often lead to an overwhelming amount of data. Creating alerts that provide useful, actionable information based on this data requires constant tuning and refinement.
The top platform engineering tools in 2024
While no single tool will solve every problem, the right combination of carefully chosen tools can dramatically improve the platform engineering experience, and thereby improve the state of the platform for developers, operations, and the business as a whole. From IaC to IDPs, the tools discussed in this section address specific pain points in the platform engineering experience, promoting more efficient and scalable operations. For each tool, we’ll discuss what it does, how it addresses platform engineering pain points, and its pros and cons.
Terraform
Terraform is an open-source, cloud-agnostic IaC tool that uses a declarative language to define and provision infrastructure. It helps to manage infrastructure complexity by providing a one-stop shop for managing computing resources across multiple cloud providers and on-premise systems, with the ability to version system architecture. With support for numerous providers, a large open-source community, an extensive module ecosystem, and its declarative syntax, Terraform offers numerous benefits. However, in large, collaborative environments, state management can become challenging. Complex architectures can also mean that there is a steep learning curve.
Kubernetes
Kubernetes is a popular open-source platform for orchestrating containers. It addresses the problems of scalability and complex application management by automating deployment and scaling of containerized applications. With capabilities like automatic load balancing and service discovery, self-healing capabilities, and familiar declarative models, Kubernetes stands out among orchestration solutions. However, the learning curve can be quite steep, and using Kubernetes in smaller teams or for simple applications can introduce unnecessary complexity.
Crossplane
Crossplane is an open-source Kubernetes add-on that allows application and infrastructure configuration to exist in the same control plane. This extends IaC capabilities using the Kubernetes declarative model, while reducing toolchain and deployment pipeline complexity. With its Kubernetes-native approach, support for custom resource creation, and separation of concerns between development and platform teams, Crossplane is a powerful addition to any IaC model. There are some drawbacks, such as a smaller ecosystem and community. Crossplane also requires basic Kubernetes knowledge, which can add another layer of complexity to environments where Kubernetes is not already used.
Docker
Docker is a popular platform for building, deploying, and running applications using containers. Docker containers address the problem of dependency management by packaging applications and their dependencies for consistent reuse across different environments. This can greatly simplify application deployment. Compared to traditional virtual machines (VMs), Docker containers are lightweight and fast. Docker is also well-suited for microservice architectures, has a large community, and a variety of pre-built container images. However, if not properly configured, Docker containers can create security issues and perform poorly. Additionally, managing persistent data can be difficult.
Jenkins
Jenkins is an open-source automation server that automates software builds, tests, and deployment. It streamlines CI/CD pipelines with a vast range of plugins and integrations. Jenkins can run on most operating systems, supports distributed builds and multiple languages, has a very active community, and is well documented. However, drawbacks include an outdated user interface compared to other tools, and a tendency toward degraded performance as the number of jobs and plugins increases.
GitHub Actions
GitHub Actions is a CI/CD platform integrated directly into GitHub. It combines code and CI/CD processes, allowing users to automate CI/CD workflows directly from their GitHub repositories. As part of the larger, well-documented GitHub ecosystem, Actions are easy to create and use. Additionally, a large marketplace of pre-built actions is available for a wide variety of common tasks. There are some downsides, including a tendency to become costly with large-scale usage. It also offers less flexibility than other standalone CI/CD tools, with Actions being limited to GitHub, which may not suit every organization.
Argo CD
Argo CD is a declarative, continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes that automates deployment using Git repositories as the single source of truth. Argo CD maintains consistency between Git and deployed applications, supports multi-cluster deployments, and provides visibility into deployment status. However, with its focus on Kubernetes, Argo CD may not be a good fit for all environments and can add unnecessary complexity to simple deployment scenarios.
HashiCorp Vault
HashiCorp Vault addresses security concerns by providing a centralized solution for managing and accessing API keys, passwords, and certificates. It provides fine-grained access controls, audit logging, and encryption, and it integrates well with other HashiCorp tools like Terraform. While HashiCorp Vault provides a clear set of security benefits, it can be complex to set up and manage, and it requires careful planning to ensure high availability.
Datadog
Datadog provides monitoring and analytics capabilities for cloud applications. It improves system visibility with monitoring and alerting capabilities across infrastructure, applications, and logs. With its unified platform and extensive integrations, Datadog provides comprehensive monitoring for all sizes and types of cloud applications. However, some advanced features have a steep learning curve, and the sheer amount of data available may overwhelm beginners.
Cortex’s IDP
Cortex’s Internal Developer Portal provides a unified view for managing software assets and infrastructure. It tackles the problems of cross-team collaboration and standardization with the centralized Developer Homepage and customizable Scaffolder workflows. Scorecards improve observability by allowing platform engineers to track important metrics, and Actions streamline CI/CD processes and reduce tool sprawl. Its vast range of integrations and plugins allows platform engineers to create a self-service environment designed for the needs of their business.
How can Cortex help?
From Kubernetes' container orchestration to Datadog's comprehensive monitoring, the top tools for platform engineers in 2024 empower platform engineers to tackle infrastructure complexity, improve scalability, strengthen security, and increase observability. Among these tools, Cortex’s IDP stands out as a unifying solution with its centralized Developer Homepage, customizable workflows, and powerful observability features. With Cortex IDP at the center of their tool suite, platform engineers can enhance productivity, increase innovation, and help developers to create better software.
Ready to see how Cortex help's platform engineers level up their impact? Book a demo with Cortex and discover how you can enhance your Developer Experience to boost productivity.
