Usually, I try to be informative in my writing, but this week I’m going to pose a question: what’s the umbrella term for DevOps, SRE and Platform Engineering?

I’ve been open about my struggles with terminology in the past (see: Why you shouldn’t call your engineers “the Platform Team”), but this one goes a little beyond my struggles with branding a team.

I write primarily about CI/CD, but also the broader challenges of running a team enabling practices such as DevOps, SRE or Platform Engineering. They’re all great practices and come from strong movements made up of people way smarter than me, but saying them all at once is a real mouthful.

These practices can be seen as variations on a theme, they can complement one another and in many ways compete with one another. For example, if you talk about DevOps and not Platform Engineering, in some sense you’re “taking a side” and excluding a number of practitioners who might benefit from your message.

I’d like to be able to talk about CI/CD, tools, incident response and everything around that without tying it to a particular philosophy. I’d like to be able to share ideas and advice with teams who may structure themselves in very different ways. I’d also like my work to maintain it’s relevance if a new philosophy emerges.

So how should I refer to this broader space? I’ve considered a few alternatives, and I’m not sure any of them really fit the bill.

Engineering Productivity (or alternatively Developer Productivity) is a term I landed upon in my last role. It served well to encapsulate the “support” nature of what we did, and the overarching goal of driving improved productivity for the overall team, be they customer facing or internal. However, this feels more like a “function” of an organization rather than a broad scope of problems to solve.

Tooling would get at the “meat” of what I was doing in these kinds of roles, which was building and integrating tools for engineers. This is particularly applicable to Platform Engineering, in my view. That said, crafting tools isn’t everything that I was doing. As I discussed in my two most recent posts [1, 2], support was a huge part of my team’s remit.

I’d love to get a conversation going on this, so here are some more direct questions for you all:

See you in the comments!