IBM i DevOps TechTalk #27
Platform Engineering

Ray Bernardi – Welcome to IBM i DevOps TechTalk, where we discuss key topics and questions with ARCAD experts. I’m Ray Bernardi and I’ll be your host today. Joining me today is Alan Ashley. He’s a Senior Solutions Architect here at ARCAD software. Today we’ll be discussing platform engineering. So Alan we’ve heard the term platform engineering. Can you give me an idea of what platform engineering really is?

Alan Ashley – Right. So when you start thinking about this platform engineering, it’s really about building up an operating internal developer platforms, where are you going to be doing your work? For example, maybe you’re spawning a testing environment on the fly as part of your DevOps process. So what this is, is it’s really starting to standardize the tools that you would use.
So that, for example, you have a GitHub repository, you’re maybe using Jenkins or maybe GitHub actions. And these things are starting to work together, but now you’re starting to pull in the platform side of it so that you spawn a cloud environment. Maybe you’re moving data from point A to point B, and then you’re deploying your releases so that they can go into testing.
That’s just one area of the platform engineering aspect of things. So it’s going to be a topic that’s going to come up. You’ll hear it more and more throughout the rest of 2026 going in because it is really just kind of starting to encapsulate the larger DevOps community and wrapping all those things together because it is more than just writing code.

R.B. – All right. So this is definitely coming out of DevOps and that drive that’s going on right now. So how does this actually help in the DevOps journey?

A.A. – So when you think the DevOps or the DevSecOps journey that most of us are familiar with, you’re talking about creating and deploying on a rapid function. So you innovate and you deploy, you innovate, you deploy. That’s that kind of that cycle that goes through there where you’re getting constant feedback. When you start looking outside of just the code, what comes into play?
You’re talking environments. Maybe it’s a Linux environment or a windows environment or an IBM i that needs to be tested on, maybe in collaboration with a windows server running a web interface. And so you’ve got these different environments starting to come together that need to fall into this DevOps journey. And that’s where the platform engineering starts to come in.
You’re starting to encapsulate the DevOps. So you have DevOps maybe in the center of your circle, and you’re doing all your development. Now with platform engineering, you can start to pull in the different areas of environments and network access and things like that to better automate and enhance your DevOps journey.

R.B. – Okay, so this is where I’m hearing that term internal developer platform IDP? So basically what’s happening here is we’re creating a set of tools, API services, whatever they need workflows and so on so that developers can go from an idea to production really quickly using a standard set of tools. Is that basically it?

A.A. – That’s in essence it. And what this is doing is this is going to start speeding up those functions. And even with AI coming around and really starting to get its grasp on things, you’ll start to see AI coming here where you can start posing possible questions, to it or scenario saying, hey, AI when you see this, do this or maybe assist, you need to spawn this environment just based off of what it knows and when it learns for that.

R.B. – So we’re here to talk about DROPS. How does that fit in with platform engineering.

A.A. – So DROPS is really going to be a nice kind of essential tool because the platform engineering is bringing together the tools that you use. And DROPS is going to be one of those tools because as we know, DROPS is fantastic on release orchestration. It can go across multiple platforms and serial and parallel however you want to do it through the hundreds of built in scripts that are in DROPS.
So you can really fine tune these areas and we know DROPS integrates with Git and Jenkins and Azure and all the other platforms out there. So it ties in really nicely to that overall platform engineering philosophy. Because we know it can provide the governance over deployment. So that’s one of the big things goes how can we find this.
Well you can look right in DROPS and see exactly where every release went. Which version of that release. You can validate release levels across multiple platforms. So you know from DROPS in platform engineering, they really go hand in hand. And when you add DROPS to it, you start to even take out more of that possible human error that may come into it.

R.B. – So basically what you’re talking about here is workflow automation. And that’s part of platform engineering as far as I’ve read. I mean they’re talking about paved paths to production. That’s what they use when they talk about platform engineering. So I mean consistently being able to do the same thing, a repeatable deployment process, that’s what DROPS is doing.

A.A. – Yes, DROPS is doing that. And it’s starting to help with that automation. So DROPS is really just going to slide right into that platform engineering philosophy. And it’s just going to enhance the movement going forward through its multi-platform distribution abilities and single click rollbacks. For deployments.

R.B. – So DROPS is a deployment logic basically. And no team has to build their own scripts or anything like that. And every team can use the same tool.

A.A. – Yes. And that’s where you start to standardize your tool sets so that everything is easier to manage from a corporate level.

R.B. – So this has taken away a lot of infrastructure complexity from the developers. You basically putting it into this tool, using this tool, taking the overhead off to developers and saying when you need to put something somewhere, this is going to do it for you.

A.A. – Exactly. This is going to be kind of your one stop shop for doing your automation and moving things forward.

R.B. – Thanks, Alan. So to sum this up, DROPS fits right into the heart of platform engineering. It brings automation, governance and consistency and provides a single orchestrated deployment workflow. It can help your teams ship software faster, safer and with total confidence. It connects legacy and modern systems in one unified release process. That’s how DROPS fits into platform engineering.
That’s it for today’s episode. Thanks for tuning in and listening.