Platform engineering

Platform Engineering describes the building of internal developer platforms that lay a unified self-service layer over the underlying infrastructure. Instead of each team building its own CI/CD pipelines, deployment workflows and monitoring setups, a platform team provides these building blocks as reusable, standardised services.

The goal is to assess this approach for our Siron One ecosystem. Reusable GitHub Actions workflows and composite actions keep the CI pipelines of all microservices DRY. Maven archetypes and service templates generate the basic scaffolding for new components, while a central Helm library and shared Docker base images standardise the runtime setup. Deployments run via GitOps with Argo CD on Kubernetes, and a dedicated operator manages Siron One specific features declaratively.

The platform team abstracts away topics such as secret management, observability and compliance, without taking control away from the product teams. This significantly speeds up the setup of new microservices and updates to the platform automatically propagate to all dependent projects.