Top 7 Platform Engineering Tools

by: Alexandre Couedelo
Apr 02, 2024

Original Article: Top 7 Platform Engineering Tools

Summary

This article provides an insightful overview of the top 7 platform engineering tools that significantly enhance developer productivity and streamline the software development lifecycle. It delves into the functionalities, pros, and cons of each tool, including Backstage for building developer portals and managing a software catalog with self-service IDP capabilities; Terraform for infrastructure as code (IaC) and provisioning cloud infrastructure using HCL; Kubernetes as the leading container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management; Prometheus for robust systems monitoring and alerting through its time series database for metrics; Logstash, a versatile data processing pipeline for handling logs and events and integrating with tools like Elasticsearch; Jaeger for distributed tracing in microservices to identify performance bottlenecks; and finally, SigNoz, an APM and observability platform that unifies traces, metrics, and logs using OpenTelemetry. You will gain valuable knowledge on how these tools standardize tooling, automate processes, and implement best practices for efficient application development, deployment, and operations.

Key Concepts

Platform Engineering: Focuses on improving overall developer productivity through standardized tooling, automation, and best practices.
Internal Development Platform (IDP): A shared infrastructure and platform that software teams use to develop, deploy, and operate applications.
Backstage: An open-source platform by Spotify for building developer portals, acting as a software catalog and enabling self-service IDP through software templates.
Terraform: An open-source Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool from HashiCorp that uses HCL to provision cloud infrastructure, managing state and dependencies.
Kubernetes: The de facto open-source container orchestration system for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications using declarative configurations (YAML).
Prometheus: An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit with a time series database for pulling and storing application metrics, often used with Grafana and Alertmanager.
Logstash: An open-source data processing pipeline for ingesting, transforming, and sending logs and events to various stashes like Elasticsearch, improving query performance and reducing storage costs.
Jaeger: An open-source distributed tracing system developed by Uber for monitoring and troubleshooting microservices-based distributed systems, helping identify performance bottlenecks.
SigNoz: An open-source Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and observability platform that uses the OpenTelemetry standard to collect and unify traces, metrics, and logs, stored in ClickHouse for high performance.