Glossary
Here's the Gruntwork take on the most common terms we encounter in Platform Engineering and DevOps:
Developer Platform
A Developer Platform is the collection of tools, methods, and services used to enable developers to quickly deploy the infrastructure they need using a standardized approach. It abstracts operational complexity so application teams can focus on building business value.
DevOps Engineer
A DevOps engineer works within application teams to automate software delivery and manage the infrastructure needed to run their applications. They handle both building applications and operating the underlying systems.
Platform Engineer
A Platform engineer builds internal developer platforms that provide standardized, self-service infrastructure tools across the organization. They abstract operational complexity so application teams can focus on building business value.
DevOps vs. Platform Engineer
| DevOps Engineer | Platform Engineer | |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Works within application teams | Works across the organization |
| Focus | Building and running specific applications | Building platforms that enable other teams |
| Cognitive Load | Carries operational burden for their applications | Reduces operational burden for all teams |
| Output | Ships applications and features | Ships platforms and tooling |
| Primary Goal | Make their team ship faster | Make all teams ship faster with less complexity |
DevOps bankruptcy
When organizations wind up in some or all of these failure modes they may reach a breaking point we describe as DevOps Bankruptcy: a point at which starting fresh is often the better option because correcting the anti-patterns in their current infrastructure paradigm would be too costly.
Unit
Any company's infrastructure is made up of many component parts. We call the most basic component part a unit of infrastructure or just unit for short. For example, we consider one instance of one OpenTofu/Terraform module, one "unit." In fact, our open source IaC orchestrator Terragrunt uses this exact terminology!
Stack
Companies often need to combine their units into common, repeated patterns. We call an opinionated combination of units a stack.