Develop a Scalable Platform Architecture
Building a scalable platform is critical for ensuring that an organization can grow without compromising the performance, reliability, or flexibility of its systems. As the organization expands, it's essential that the platform can handle increasing demand, new feature requirements, and more complex workflows. The platform must not only support more users but also be flexible enough to adapt to new technologies and features. By focusing on capacity planning, platform engineers are able to ensure that the organization can continue to innovate while meeting evolving expectations of its users.
Capacity planning and estimation
Capacity planning is essential for forecasting future resource needs and ensuring that the platform can handle projected growth without compromising performance or stability. Capacity planning involves analyzing historical data, identifying usage patterns, and estimating the infrastructure needs for the future. Tools like cloud cost calculators, load testing tools, and monitoring platforms are key for gathering this data and making informed decisions about resource provisioning.
Estimating capacity needs also involves understanding both short-term and long-term growth patterns. By using automated scaling tools and defining auto-scaling policies, the platform can adjust resources dynamically in response to changes in demand, ensuring optimal performance without the need for manual intervention. Proper capacity planning allows the platform to handle growth smoothly, ensuring that resources are allocated efficiently and that performance doesn't degrade during peak usage periods.
Cost optimization
To effectively manage costs in platform engineering, it's essential to identify workload owners and track resource usage. This can be done by using metadata, such as AKS labels, Azure Resource Manager tags, and deployment environments, to associate resources with specific owners. Regular reporting can help track orphaned resources, and cost management tools like Microsoft Cost Management can help allocate costs to individual teams. For shared resources, costs can be divided evenly or based on usage, with tools like OpenCost or Kubecost offering insights into consumption.
When deciding where to invest in your application platform, consider whether to adapt existing platforms, start fresh, or use a combination of both. Focus on areas with significant, long-term value, such as improving observability or addressing high costs. Evaluate whether custom solutions are necessary or if off-the-shelf products would be more effective, as custom solutions tend to require ongoing maintenance. Prioritize automating provisioning, tracking, and deployment, and adapt your platform over time using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and application templating for flexibility.
As the platform scales, the importance of managing costs effectively becomes even more profound. In a cloud-based environment, scaling tends to lead to increased costs, so it’s crucial to optimize resource allocation and avoid over-provisioning. Cost optimization involves choosing the right pricing models, such as pay-as-you-go or reserved instances, and ensuring that resources are allocated efficiently.
To manage costs, organizations can use cloud cost management tools to track usage and optimize infrastructure spending. For example, by applying auto-scaling capabilities, the platform can automatically adjust resources based on demand, preventing unnecessary expenditure during off-peak periods. Other cost-saving strategies include rightsizing instances, using serverless computing where appropriate, and utilizing spot instances for non-critical workloads. This ensures that the platform can scale efficiently without incurring excessive costs, which is vital for maintaining profitability as the organization grows.