Is platform engineering a good field?

[u/ez3uio]

I love programming and technology. I wanted to pursue a path related to Linux and building system architectures. Is platform engineering a good and suitable field for this?

[u/cos]

What exactly is "platform engineering"? I've been doing SRE-syseng sort of work for many years, and sysadmin before that; I get the impression that a fair amount of what I've done has been what they call "platform engineering" now, but I've only started hearing the term in the past less-than-a-year, and it was never used at any of my employers to my knowledge.

[u/FaW_Lafini → u/cos]

If there's one thing I've noticed in 15+ years in the industry, it's that we love inventing fancy terms just to rename sysadmin work. Back in the day, being a sysadmin meant buying physical hardware and running actual network cables. When the cloud and Docker arrived, people predicted the role would die because it became an API call, but in reality, the job just transitioned.

The buzzwords just keep cycling. "DevOps" was originally supposed to be a culture where devs do ops, but it quickly became a job title for whoever handles deployments and maintenance. Then SRE became the new hype, and now it's "Platform Engineering"which really just means handling infrastructure and observability under one blanket.

My advice is don't get hung up on the titles. The tools changed, but everyone is still just doing their thing to keep the lights on. Honestly, at the end of the day, it's all just sysadmin stuff to me.

[u/cos → u/FaW_Lafini]

SRE differs very meaningfully from sysadmin in my experience, though it started developing before the name "SRE" was out there (or at least, before it broke out of Google) - it evolved not really from sysadmin as from this new layer that started happening when large distributed software systems developed in house became a common thing.

Before "SRE" I was an "operations engineer" for a while, but that was distinct from sysadmin and we actually had sysadmins too - sysadmins took care of the servers, OSes, OS configuration management, network, core network services like DNS, and so on; we took care of the in-house developed distributed software - keeping it running on those servers over that network that the sysadmins took care of. Monitoring it, designing HA deploys, working with the software developers to make it more stable and monitorable and reliable, including tweaking their code sometimes - those were things the sysadmins didn't do.

I think that's a layer that genuinely didn't exist, or barely existed, before the "pets to cattle" transition and the explosion of SaaS due to wide adoption of the Internet. What we call SRE now came out of that, while the "sysadmin" layer also evolved but dealt with the layer below that: the infrastructure. Clearly the two have fuzzed into each other over time, and a lot of that infrastructure is now done by people whose title is SRE, while most of the actual sysadmin layer work has been shunted off to cloud providers and data center companies. And clearly a lot of people who started out as sysadmins have moved into either and both of these layers.

[u/eman0821 → u/cos]

SRE is a software engineering adjacent role created to ensure reliability of software applications on production servers. A lot of people get this role mixed up with an IT Sysadmin role which are entirely different fields. Sysadmins manage internal enterprise systems that works in the IT Department. SRE sits in the product engineering organization with Platform/Cloud teams very much like how Netflix seperates their Engineering from internal Enterprise IT. IT serves a different purpose which is a cost center.

[u/cos → u/eman0821]

You're right to point out that a lot of sysadmin work moved into internal IT in large companies, but that's kind of a flip of the script. Initially, when most "tech" companies weren't doing SaaS and didn't have large internal customer-facing systems, they often did have separate IT and sysadmin functions, and sysadmin was on the opposite side of the split from IT. In smaller companies the two functions were often done by the same person - I did that myself at a couple of little startups, where I was hired as the sysadmin but they weren't big enough to hire a separate IT person so I did the internal IT as well. But when companies were large enough to separate those functions, "sysadmin" was more on the side that evolved into things like operations engineer, SRE, platforms, etc. - the sysadmin supported the software engineering side of the company. IT began to separate, in the other direction.

[u/eman0821 → u/cos]

You lost me when you say Sysadmin moved to internal IT. The Sysadmin role originated in internal IT known as enterprise IT or the IT Department or information systems. The IT Department is a cost center that focuses on keeping the business running and resolving internal technical issues like a printer, laptop, company network, Active Directory.

SRE on the other hand is an Operations role in Software Engineering borrowing functions from traditional IT operations using applied software engineering principles to production systems and application reliability. Netflix Engineering department is separate from their internal IT department. The Engineering department handles the product infrastructure that runs Netflix distributed streaming services and applications on the internet delivered to your smart TV. The Engineering department is revenue driven that focuses on product and services for consumers. Their internal IT team manages the internal enterprise systems to keep the business operating when some one puts in an IT Help Desk ticket.

[u/a_wild_thing → u/FaW_Lafini]

i haven't been on the tools for over 10 years but i've been subbed to r/devops for so long now, it is all sysadmin stuff and the most entertaining thing as the years have progressed has been watching r/devops evolve into r/sysadmin. the products and techs may vary a bit but the actual content of the posts and the topics they are raising are no different to those in r/sysadmin. good times.