As platform engineering continues to grow in popularity inside enterprises, an all-new training curriculum is being launched that will provide one of the first platform engineering certifications in the industry.
The training and certification, offered by the global platform engineering developer’s community PlatformEngineering.org, will begin on Aug. 6 and include two courses and a certification exam that will help IT administrators gain new skills in this burgeoning field.
The courses include an eight-week Platform Engineering Fundamentals class and an MVP (Minimum Viable Platform) to IDP (Internal Development Platform) course, followed by a certification exam combining platform engineering theory with hands-on tasks. Each of the courses will be held for eight to 10 weeks with live, interactive, online meetup sessions taught by platform engineering experts and some of the top platform architects in the industry, according to the group. The live nature of the courses will provide instant feedback, back-and-forth Q&As and an up-to-the-minute feel for the instruction. The live sessions are expected to run for up to 2.5 hours per class module.
IT admins can still sign up for the certification courses through Monday, Aug. 5, on the organization’s website.
“The number-one question from the community is ‘How do I become a platform engineer?’” Luca Galante, the lead instructor and vice president of product and growth for platform engineering vendor, Humanitec, told The New Stack. “So, we wanted to create a resource for IT admins [based on] the three or four years of really good content we have under our belt.”
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The certification course will be a combination of theory and hands-on internal developer platform building. The first course, the fundamentals instruction, is ready to go for the students and includes eight weekly modules on topics from an introduction to platform engineering to how to build an internal developer platform. Other modules include getting started with reference architectures, designing golden paths for developers, finding the right abstractions, infrastructure platform engineering, how to build minimum viable platforms and selling your minimum viable platforms to key stakeholders inside enterprises.
The second course is still being developed, but it will go beyond the basics to teach full rollout strategies and adoption paths across multiple workflows and teams, according to the group.
The fundamentals course is priced at $2,149, but registrants can use the code EARLYBIRD20 when registering to drop the price by 20% to $1,720. Once the development of the second course is completed, Galante said he expects that a special bundle price will be available for the combined courses and the exam for the students in the program.
The curriculum is being built to ensure that students who successfully complete the courses and exam will be able to demonstrate an elevated level of understanding and knowledge of platform engineering, from its theory to firsthand skills and expertise.
At least one other platform engineering course is also available today in the tech marketplace, from training vendor Pluralsight.
What Is Platform Engineering?
Platform engineering is becoming more common as more companies find that it empowers their software developers and accelerates their operational efficiencies. Platform engineering allows IT systems administrators to choose and assemble proven, curated and regularly maintained development applications, and then deliver them to a company’s developers via an all-in-one self-service portal.
By using one of these custom, standardized internal developer platforms (IDPs) and tools inside a company, developers are freed to do their core work activities, rather than spending valuable time searching for applications they need to create and test their code. These IDPs 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.
Who Is Interested in Platform Engineering?
Many of the first students coming into the new certification program are individuals who want to learn the skills and fundamentals for their own edification, said Galante. “They are DevOps engineers or some junior engineers that want to have these skills. But we are already seeing teams purchasing the course. And we are getting applicants from large companies where they have systems administrators or IT admins who they want to upskill to become platform engineers or upskill their existing platform team to educate them around best practices.”
The guest lecturers who will participate in the courses include experts like Manuel Pais, co-author of the book, Team Topologies, and Ajay Chankramath, former head of platform engineering at the technology consultancy Thoughtworks.
An Enrollee Shares Why He Is Taking the Certification Course
Giovanny Velez, a platform engineering technical lead for a cloud-based applications vendor in Colombia, told The New Stack that he is taking the certification coursework to gain more experience and understanding of this still-emerging technology from a reliable and knowledgeable source.
“This platform engineering course and certification will significantly boost my professional growth and career prospects and will validate my expertise, increasing my credibility and making me a stronger candidate for advanced roles,” Velez wrote in an email. “It will open new career opportunities and potentially accelerate my path to senior positions.”
Velez said the courses will also teach him industry best practices and innovative tools that will improve his problem-solving abilities and help him stay current with the latest trends in platform engineering. “This knowledge is essential in our team as we are starting to implement the practice, and it helps us to streamline the process,” he said.
Velez, who is paying for the course himself, said he learned of the program after seeing announcements on the PlatformEngineering.org webpage and in its Slack channel.
“The program will also provide valuable networking opportunities, connecting me with other professionals in the field,” he said. “These connections can lead to knowledge sharing and future collaborations. Overall, I think that I will be more prepared to tackle the challenges of modern, cloud native environments and deliver increased value in my role. I see this field growing constantly and I see more job offers in the market.”
As lead for his company’s recently formed platform engineering team, Velez said the company is working to establish communication channels and that he will share his experiences with the course at his company “so the rest of the teams know what we will be doing and how.”
Analyst Reactions to Platform Engineering Training
Two analysts contacted by The New Stack said they believe that platform engineering training and certifications are a smart move for enterprises.
“Training is always smart, particularly if it is done by a company that offers related products and services because they will be up to date on the kind of unique, new and changing problems that IT is dealing with,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst with the Enderle Group.
Enderle said he often hears from IT managers that employees are learning on the job rather than getting advanced training, which is creating huge deployment and operational problems.
“They need training like this to reduce those problems,” he added. “Learning on the job or from some obsolete lesson plan continues to be problematic. I recommend training from current practitioners so that those learning can hit the ground running and become immediately able to do the job right. It makes for better implementations, and it makes employees more valuable and less likely to get laid off.”
Another analyst, Dan Olds, CEO of Olds Research, agrees.
“The concept of platform engineering is what the hyperscale organizations — think Amazon, Google, and Meta — pioneered to allow them to efficiently operate at vast scale,” said Olds. “The idea behind it is to have a specific set of development tools — and only that set — which pays dividends when it comes to scalability, reliability, support and troubleshooting, to name a few. This is something that is catching on with other large organizations that have lots of applications in flight all the time as it simplifies the development, deployment and support functions.”
Such an approach simplifies the overall application development/deployment and life-cycle management processes for companies, said Olds. “In many organizations today, developers are able to pick and choose from a huge slate of development tools, which can lead to problems down the road when it comes to deployment, troubleshooting and the inevitable changes — unless those functions are performed by the engineer or engineers who actually developed the app. Standardizing development tools ensures that everyone is using the same size building blocks and understands how they fit together.”
Olds said he recommends that enterprise IT shops should investigate platform engineering, along with their counterparts in a company’s business units.
“I can see where this approach would increase the speed of application development and result in smoother deployments,” he said. But at the same time, while this holistic platform engineering approach can be beneficial for organizations, a potential problem could be getting all developers on board with it.
“I think that it might be a hard sell to some developers,” said Olds. “They are experts at the set of tools they use and have reasons why they do not use alternatives. It might take some work to get them out of their comfort zones and get them on board with this new approach.”