Startups are primarily focused on building products and quickly finding product-market fit. However, cloud platforms, designed for broad applicability, prioritize flexibility over productivity. This conflict arises because startups need maximum productivity tailored to their needs, while cloud providers offer generic solutions. Startups often invest in customizing and optimizing their productivity tools despite wanting to minimize distractions from product development. This tension highlights the need for platform engineering to streamline and enhance productivity tools specific to the startup’s unique requirements.
This blog is based on the webinar with André Eriksson, Founder and CEO of Encore. Encore offers a super-productive local development experience and allows complex cloud deployments. Â
Understanding platform engineering
Platform engineering involves building upon low-level cloud infrastructure provided by vendors and integrating various specialized tools from the open-source ecosystem. This approach creates a cohesive internal platform that enhances developer productivity by standardizing toolsets and workflows tailored to the company’s needs.
Some organizations approach solving this challenge by building their own platforms internally. This allows for customization but requires a significant investment in time and resources. Others may leverage existing platform engineering solutions or services provided by third-party vendors to accelerate their development processes while balancing customization with operational efficiency.
Different types of approaches to platform engineering
Organizations adopt various approaches to platform engineering to optimize their development environments and infrastructure management. Some prefer a do-it-yourself (DIY) strategy, which builds custom solutions tailored to specific needs and fosters innovation but often requires significant resource investment. Others opt for standardized platforms like Kubernetes or Terraform, which offer robust ecosystems but may involve steep learning curves. Vendor-managed services provide ease of use and maintenance, though at the cost of potential vendor lock-in and reduced flexibility. Hybrid approaches blend these strategies to balance control, customization, and convenience to align with an organization’s specific operational and strategic goals.Â
Six challenges encountered by startups
When startups engage in platform engineering, they often encounter several pitfalls:
- Deferring Investment: Early-stage startups may delay establishing a robust platform, opting instead to patch solutions as needed to validate product concepts quickly. This cost-effective strategy can later result in technical debt and scalability challenges as the business grows.
- Using Small-Scale Solutions: Startups may initially choose platforms like Firebase or Superbase, designed for smaller projects and offering rapid productivity boosts. However, these solutions can become limiting, necessitating a transition to more scalable platforms as the startup expands.
- Proactive Investment in Platform Engineering: Some startups invest early in building a custom platform or adopting sophisticated platform engineering practices. This approach requires significant upfront resources but can lead to substantial long-term scalability and operational efficiency benefits.
- Underestimating Scalability: Focusing on immediate needs without considering future growth can lead startups to select non-scalable solutions, leading to potential performance issues and costly system overhauls as demands increase.
- Over-Engineering: Investing excessively in complex systems before verifying product-market fit can save resources, simplify the tech stack, and delay product deployment. A lean approach focusing on minimally viable products and iterative development based on user feedback can mitigate this risk.
- Vendor Lock-in: Heavy reliance on a single vendor can restrict future flexibility and innovation, potentially leading to higher costs and misaligning the startup’s evolving needs. Evaluating multiple vendors, embracing open standards, and designing for interoperability can help avoid these constraints.
Encore’s solution to address startup challenges
Encore’s approach to platform engineering combines backend SDK capabilities for standardized development with a cloud platform that automates DevOps tasks, deploying directly to the startup’s own cloud environment. This approach aims to offer the flexibility of cloud infrastructure with the productivity gains of a streamlined platform tailored to meet both immediate development needs and future scalability requirements.
Encore is designed to cater to startups and enterprises by enhancing developer productivity and addressing common cloud infrastructure challenges:
- Target Audience: Encore is primarily aimed at startups, particularly early-stage ones, that want to solve common pain points related to cloud development. These include running systems locally, provisioning and managing cloud infrastructure like databases and pub/sub services, ensuring security, and effectively managing permissions.
- Automated Solutions: Encore achieves automation by analyzing developers’ source code to understand backend services, API endpoints, and infrastructure dependencies. This standardized approach allows Encore to automatically provision and manage infrastructure directly in the developer’s own cloud environment.
- Benefits for Enterprises: While startups greatly benefit from Encore’s streamlined development and infrastructure management, larger enterprises can integrate Encore into their existing DevOps workflows. This integration enhances local development environments and improves productivity, but it may only partially leverage Encore’s automation capabilities as startups do.
- Developer and Ops Focus: Encore’s design addresses the concerns of both developers, who benefit from a simplified development experience, and operations teams (Ops), who appreciate the automation and standardization of infrastructure management. This dual focus aims to bridge the gap between development and operations, ensuring smoother workflows and enhanced employee productivity.
Future of Encore’s offerings
Encore is positioned to offer significant value to startups by optimizing their cloud development processes from an early stage. While larger enterprises can also benefit, their integration typically involves enhancing existing practices rather than fully leveraging Encore’s comprehensive automation features.
- Azure Support: Encore has nearly completed Azure support and is finalizing details. Interested parties can contact Encore directly to join a private beta.
- Product-Market Fit for Startups: Encore is especially beneficial for startups aiming to find product-market fit quickly. It allows them to focus on product development without getting bogged down in complex infrastructure management, addressing the unique challenges of cloud adoption while maintaining productivity.
- Future Outlook: Encore plans to expand language support, starting with TypeScript and later including Python, to cater to a broader range of development needs, including AI and machine learning applications. This expansion will further enhance the platform’s utility for diverse use cases.