Happy new year!
I had a ton of time over the holidays to think about platform engineering more theoretically and some key themes come up over and over again: how to ensure Return on Investment and adoption of an Internal Developer Platform. And I came to the conclusion that a key guiding principle in the design of platform architecture should be to optimize towards Pareto Efficiency. You’re thinking “ha, I know this, it’s this 80/20 thing”. That is the Pareto Principle, which states that 80% of outcomes result from 20% of the causes, highlighting the imbalance between effort and results. This is also relevant as I’ve highlighted many times especially when it comes to what estate coverage of your platform to expect.Â
But that’s not what I mean here. Pareto Efficiency, originally an economics concept, describes a state where you can improve the outcome for some participants without making anyone else worse off. In a platform engineering context, that means designing the architecture so that no stakeholder’s experience or productivity deteriorates when you introduce new tools or processes. If a solution appears beneficial for one group but shifts responsibilities or burdens onto another, the overall efficiency can remain unchanged—or even diminish.Â
For instance, adopting a developer portal like Backstage might seem advantageous at first glance, but if developers create hundreds of new resources and operations teams end up working extra hours to maintain them, the net gain is lost. Similarly, a highly standardized “black box” platform may reduce the workload for operations but introduce friction for developers who need deeper visibility into their tooling. In both cases, any localized improvement is counterbalanced by a corresponding drawback elsewhere. The key to avoiding this pitfall is engaging with users early, evaluating potential ripple effects, and optimizing across the entire application lifecycle rather than isolating improvements in just one domain.
The first thing to acknowledge is that Platform Engineering is a multiplayer game, this awkward video I recorded last summer covers that.Â
Also, I just got my travel schedule this year and it turns out I’m everywhere, all at once. If you’re at PlatformCon Live Days I’ll be in London and New York. I will be at Google Next, ReInvent, Microsoft Ignite, Kubecon etc. If you’re around: hit me up!Â
Looking forward to another year serving platform engineers, see you around!Â
Kaspar
