Tools used by the top 1% of Platform Engineers and their Commercial Open Source Alternatives

In today’s article, we are diving deep into the top tools used by platform engineers and their commercial open source alternatives

The tools that we will be talking about will around:

• Infrastructure as code management
• Service Catalogs
• Observability
• CI/CD within Hosted Git

Problem that tool solves	Open Source	Proprietary SaaS
Infrastructure as Code Management	Digger	Hashicorp Terraform Cloud
Service Catalog	Backstage	Port
Observability	Signoz	Datadog
CI/CD within VCS	Gitlab CI	Github Actions

Lets dive into each of them one by one:

Infrastructure as code (IaC) management

Infrastructure as Code management involves being able to use IaC as a team in a reproducible and consistent manner. Teams use either OpenTofu or Terraform to provision their infrastructure as code, but use IaC managment tools, often called “Terraform automation and Collaboration Software” (Tacos) to manage and automate this in a team setting - specifically for things such as state management, role based access controls, drift detection and concurrent runs.

Digger is a Commercial Open Source IaC management platform and Hashicorp’s Terraform Cloud is the proprietary SaaS company offering IaC management.

Check Digger's repo on GitHub

Service Catalogs

A service catalog centralizes all infrastructure tools, services, and documentation, streamlining the development process. It acts as a single point of access for developers, enhancing efficiency and coherence in the deployment and management of infrastructure. By consolidating resources and guidelines, it simplifies decision-making and promotes best practices, ensuring a more unified and effective development environment. In addition to this it includes information about deliverables, prices, contact points, and ordering and request processes.

Backstage by Spotify is an Open Source Service Catalog and Port is a Proprietary SaaS offering the same service.

Check the Backstage repo on GitHub

Observability

Observability platforms provide a comprehensive view of environments by visualizing metrics, traces, and logs in a single interface. They allow monitoring of key performance indicators like p99 latency, error rates, and API calls. Users can pinpoint issues' root causes by examining specific traces and detailed flame-graphs of request traces. These platforms enable running aggregates on trace data to derive business-relevant metrics. Additionally, they offer functionalities to filter and query logs, create custom dashboards and alerts, and automatically record exceptions in various programming languages. Their easy-to-use query builders facilitate setting up custom alerts efficiently.

Signoz is a commercial Open Source Observability Tool and Datadog is a popular Proprietary SaaS product offering the same service.

Check Signoz's repo on GitHub

CI/CD within VCS

CI/CD systems integrated within version control platforms like GitHub automate the software delivery process. They enable continuous integration (CI) by automatically testing code changes, ensuring that new code integrates smoothly into the existing codebase. Continuous Delivery (CD) follows, where the tested changes are automatically deployed to production environments.

Using CI/CD within version control systems (VCS) like GitHub, as opposed to external services such as CircleCI, offers several advantages. Integrated CI/CD is seamlessly connected with the codebase, streamlining workflows and reducing the need for additional configuration or context switching. Built-in CI/CD tools in VCS are often more user-friendly for teams already familiar with the VCS environment, and they may provide better integration with other features of the VCS platform.

Gitlab CI is a commercial Open Source CI/CD Tool within Gitlab VCS and GitHub Actions is Proprietary product offering a similar service.

Comments

[Mohamed]

I'm a top 1% platform engineer

[Bap]

Short and sweet + great tools there. Thanks 🙏

[Utpal Nadiger]

Thanks Bap!

[Pawan Jain]

Got to know about Backstage.
Thanks for sharing COSS alternatives used by platform engineers

[Utpal Nadiger]

Cheers Pavan!

[Marc Seitz]

Very cool that you listed the open source alternatives!

[Utpal Nadiger]

Thanks Marc!

[Marc Seitz]

💪

[Matija Sosic]

Thanks for sharing! What would be the main difference between Digger and TF cloud, besides the open-source?

[Utpal Nadiger]

Great Q - Digger runs within your existing CI/CD system (eg GitHub Actions), and doesn't require you to duplicate compute for Terraform Deployment. Because of this reason you end up saving on paying twice for compute.

Another reason to use Digger over TFC is that Digger Cloud is priced per user, but TFC is priced per resource under management, which becomes extremely expensive at scale.

[Pranay Prateek]

Thanks for featuring SigNoz - if anyone wants to check our github repo -> github.com/signoz/signoz