Platform Engineering Reshapes Software Dev at Bechtle
With diverse software needs from thousands of customers around the world, Bechtle AVS, a German IT integration services and consulting vendor, faced immense pressure to create applications that satisfied all its users. And its 100 internal application developers also faced frustrations due to a lack of standardized development tools that would allow them to build those applications for customers and for Bechtle AVS itself.
In 2014, Bechtle AVS entered the cloud native world and began developing applications using microservices for its customers in industries that must meet regulatory requirements. The applications were built as standardized product offerings, which were then customized using microservices for each customer’s tasks within individual dedicated environments. At the time, this seemed like the right thing to do. But eventually, having all those separate and unique dedicated environments turned out to make things more complicated.
The reason was simple. Different customers had different security and regulatory compliance requirements that affected their applications and tasks, causing Bechtle AVS to gingerly juggle many environments, responsibilities, and requirements. These complicated scenarios put more pressure on Bechtle AVS’s developers and DevOps teams, leading to morale problems and staff departures.
Something had to give, André Alfter, the co-founder and principal of Bechtle’s Software Solutions 360° Competence Center for Digitalization at Bechtle IT-Systemhouse Bonn/Cologne, told The New Stack.
“It was horrible,” said Alfter. “It was a missing standardization of environments, [and the creation] of multiple environments. Also, I could not guarantee governance and compliance over these environments. The cognitive load on our engineering practice was massive.”
Platform Engineering Delivered the Needed Changes
To solve these vexing issues, about 18 months ago Alfter decided on a platform engineering approach to make the needed changes in the company’s development strategies and pipelines.
With platform engineering, IT systems administrators choose and assemble proven, curated and regularly maintained development applications and deliver them to a company’s developers via an all-in-one self-service portal. That portal frees developers to do their work, rather than spending valuable time searching for applications they need to create and test their code. Also called internal developer platforms (IDPs), these platforms are designed to provide developers with the best code-building tools in an easy-to-use environment built to provide automation, standardization, and flexibility for busy application developers.
For Alfter, it was an easy change to make.
“I have a lot of flexibility here in this organization,” he said. “And we have direct lines to our CEO and so on.”
So, he went to his boss and explained that he needed to change Bechtle AVS’s internal development processes to reduce the pressures on the developer team, the systems administrator team, and the users, and make them work and flow with precision.
“I did not speak of platform engineering,” said Alfter. “I said I would change the team to the latest model that works.”
Alfter told his boss that the new system would transform Bechtle AVS’s development operations, boost developer morale and performance and that the company would also benefit by being able to resell the streamlined new development processes and improvements to its customers. His boss gave him the OK.
“And at the end, it was the freedom and trust we gave to the people to be successful, [as well as hiring] the right people,” said Alfter. “We have a strategy to really do the things by ourselves,” said Alfter. “That means eat your own dog food. Try out new stuff to innovate.”
After creating the new platform engineering ecosystem, Alfter went out and talked with customers about how the company was making changes that would benefit them. Quickly, Alfter had confidence that Bechtle AVS’s customers would buy into this improved strategy, he said.
“We abstracted some things out of this platform engineering approach for a minimal viable platform (MVP) to really do our own customer journey, and to onboard customers into platform engineering and give them these benefits,” said Alfter. “And what we see is, of course, not every customer then instantly buying something and … doing platform engineering. But what you do is build trust in your brand. People listen to you. For us, it is a really good way to strengthen our brand.”
How Bechtle AVS Chose Its Platform Engineering Tooling
To bring platform engineering into the organization quickly, Alfter brought in platform engineering vendor, Humanitec, to provide its ready-to-deploy platform orchestrator and open source building blocks like Score to help his company reach its goals. Alfter said he reviewed and researched several other pre-built platform engineering offerings as well before choosing Humanitec.
A major goal, he said, was to build an internal developer platform for Bechtle AVS that would follow the “platform as a product” best principles. And one of these principles is not to build everything from scratch or to reinvent the wheel.
Part of the reason, he said, was that by selecting a highly customizable off-the-shelf package he would be able to dramatically speed up the implementation for the company and its customers and developers. The other reason came from his 24 years of experience in the IT industry, watching companies try to solve their own similar IT problems and learning from their examples.
“I met too many people trying to build new tools from scratch and doing it wrong, then recognizing that they did it wrong, and then leaving the company,” said Alfter. “And then you are there with some self-built scripting collections that do not have proper lifecycle management — even though you tried to build everything in a best practices approach.”
By bringing in a vendor to deliver some of the key building blocks like a platform orchestrator, resource packages and an open source workload specification like Score, Alfter said he knew that he could avoid those disappointments and delays.
About 14 people work on improvement projects for Bechtle AVS’s platform engineering engagement, while five other workers maintain the day-to-day maintenance of the platform, developer experience tasks, and more, according to Alfter. The teams are separate because it would be too inefficient to have the same administrators perform both functions, he said.
The company declined to comment on its price tag for building its internal development platform.
Bechtle AVS’s Platform Engineering Approach
At Bechtle AVS, platform engineering is now an everyday part of the company’s operations. It took some seven to eight months to get all the pieces in place to make it happen, said Alfter. That included two months spent getting approval from management to spend money on it, and then two more months researching how it would change the company’s IT approaches, he said. Then there was also time spent creating an architecture vision, creating a draft for organizational changes, purchasing needed technologies, and one-month building and refining a minimum viable platform for Bechtle AVS’s operations.
Every developer using the platform gets the same tools, which helps to standardize, simplify, and streamline the platform, said Alfter.
“The project is ongoing, and we want to evolve the platform as well,” said Alfter. “Evolving for us means we are planning to maybe take away features [and add features] as needed. We take it as a product, and the product is a living thing. We are in production with our platform, and we deliver applications for our customers with the platform.”
