Platform engineering basics

Platform engineering is a new discipline that emerged in response to the growing complexity of modern cloud-native architectures. It describes the practice of building and maintaining an integrated product called an “Internal Developer Platform,” which acts as a flexible and supported abstraction layer between developers and the underlying technologies of their applications.

Since 2022, platform engineering has gained traction among software engineering organizations looking to enter the next stage of their DevOps evolution, and tens of thousands of platform engineers have flocked to events like PlatformCon. Gartner writes that “platform engineering is trending because of its promise to optimize the developer experience and accelerate product teams’ delivery of customer value.” They predict that, by 2026, 80 percent of software engineering organizations will have platform teams building Internal Developer Platforms.

First added to a Gartner hype cycle in 2022, platform engineering has since grown to encompass a multitude of hype cycles. Since 2024, platform engineering has had its own Gartner hype cycle, and infrastructure platform engineering, a new sub-discipline, has been mentioned in at least 9 cycles.

Platform engineering is clearly here to stay. Here’s what you need to know about it.

How platform engineering works

Platform engineering streamlines software development by building an Internal Developer Platform (IDP). This platform acts as a "vending machine" that delivers pre-configured, standardized infrastructure components and services, known as golden paths, to developers. Instead of manually managing infrastructure and configurations, developers can self-serve these standardized components through the IDP, reducing cognitive load and operational inefficiencies. This approach enables faster development cycles and promotes consistency, security, and compliance by design. The platform engineering team focuses on maintaining and optimizing the IDP, treating it as a product with developers as their customers, to continuously improve the developer experience.

What platform engineering is used for

Platform engineering is employed to enhance the overall software development and delivery process, enabling organizations to build and deploy applications faster, more efficiently, and with greater reliability. Common platform engineering use cases are:

• Improving developer experience: Platform engineering simplifies the developer experience by abstracting away infrastructure complexities and providing self-service capabilities through the IDP. Developers can focus on writing code and building features without being bogged down by infrastructure management tasks.
• Increasing development velocity: By automating and standardizing workflows, platform engineering accelerates development cycles. Developers can quickly provision infrastructure, deploy applications, and manage operational tasks, reducing wait times and bottlenecks.
• Enhancing operational efficiency: Platform engineering promotes standardization and automation, leading to more efficient infrastructure management. This reduces the burden on operations teams and allows them to focus on strategic initiatives rather than reactive "ticket ops."
• Improving security and compliance: Platform engineering helps to enforce security and compliance best practices by embedding them into the platform's core functionality. Golden paths and standardized configurations ensure that applications are deployed securely and meet regulatory requirements.
• Reducing costs: Platform engineering can contribute to cost savings by optimizing infrastructure utilization, reducing manual effort, and preventing errors that can lead to costly rework.
• Enabling multi-cloud and hybrid environments: Platform engineering provides a consistent layer of abstraction over different infrastructure environments, making it easier to adopt multi-cloud or hybrid strategies.

Platform engineering is not just about building tools; it's about transforming the way organizations deliver software by empowering developers, streamlining operations, and driving business outcomes.

Why platform engineering is important

According to internaldeveloperplatform.org, IDPs built by platform engineering teams “enforce standardization by design, increase developer productivity, and improve developer experience.” They also improve the organization’s productivity and performance across key DevOps metrics like mean time to recovery (MTTR) and Change Failure Rate. Internal Developer Platforms also improve deployment frequency and reduce lead time. Humanitec’s 2023 DevOps Benchmarking report shows a correlation between the use of Internal Developer Platforms and an organization’s degree of DevOps evolution.

The quantitative impact of platform engineering depends on an organization’s setup and size. The larger your team and toolbox are, the more an organization will benefit from an Internal Developer Platform. You can use this table to approximate how much time your organization would save by building a platform.

Here are some more key reasons why platform engineering is important:

• Taming complexity: Modern software development involves a vast and intricate ecosystem of tools, technologies, and processes. Platform engineering creates a much-needed abstraction layer over this complexity, shielding developers from the intricacies of infrastructure management and enabling them to focus on building and delivering high-quality software.
• Empowering developers, streamlining operations: Platform engineering addresses the challenge of operational inefficiencies by promoting standardization, automation, and self-service capabilities. This empowers developers to perform routine tasks independently, freeing up operations teams to focus on more strategic initiatives.
• Shifting to a product mindset: Platform engineering advocates for treating the platform itself as a product with developers as its customers. This product-centric approach ensures that the platform is designed and built to meet the specific needs of its users, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and enhancing the developer experience.
• Accelerating time to market: By streamlining workflows, automating tasks, and enabling developer self-service, platform engineering significantly reduces the time it takes to deliver software to market. This agility is crucial for organizations to remain competitive in today's fast-paced digital landscape.
• Enhancing security and compliance: Platform engineering embeds security and compliance best practices into the platform's core functionality. By establishing consistent standards for configurations, access controls, and deployment processes, platform engineering helps organizations mitigate security risks and maintain compliance with regulatory requirements.

Platform engineering is not merely a trend; it's a fundamental shift in how organizations approach software development and delivery. By investing in platform engineering, organizations can cultivate a more efficient, productive, and secure software development ecosystem, ultimately driving innovation and achieving better business outcomes.

‍

What does a platform engineering team do?

Platform engineering teams, also referred to as platform teams, build the Internal Developer Platform. They are driven by a product mindset to provide platform features that solve common problems and boost developer productivity.

Optimize iteration speed. Platform teams focus on optimizing every step of the software delivery process. This involves simplifying the way developers interact with infrastructure, streamlining the onboarding process, and making local development and testing faster and easier.

Solve common problems. Platform teams identify common challenges shared across multiple teams and build solutions that ease those pain points. They use a combination of qualitative feedback from developers and quantitative evidence (like performance on engineering KPIs) to ensure their solution is getting the job done.

Act as glue. Platform teams bring all of the tools together and ensure a painless development and deployment experience for their engineers.

Educate and empower the organization. Through conducting regular architectural design reviews for new projects or organizing internal hackathons, successful platform teams become a central source of education and best practices for the rest of the organization.

How do you build a platform engineering team?

Building a high-performing platform engineering team requires careful consideration of several factors, including team structure, roles and responsibilities, skill sets, and cultural mindset. 

Upskilling existing talent: Embracing the product mindset

One way to go can be leveraging and upskilling existing talent within the organization, such as individuals from DevOps, infrastructure operations, cloud ops, and SRE teams, as a primary approach to building a platform engineering team.

The most crucial aspect of this transition is investing in a deep understanding of the "platform as a product" philosophy. This means shifting away from a project-based, one-and-done approach to infrastructure management towards a continuous cycle of building, iterating, and improving the platform based on user feedback and stakeholder alignment.

Essential roles and functions

While specific titles may vary, we emphasize the importance of understanding the key functions that need to be covered within a platform engineering team, regardless of its size.

• Platform product manager: This role is crucial for driving the platform's product vision, understanding developer needs, gathering feedback, prioritizing features, and ensuring the platform delivers value to its users. Finding individuals with both the technical depth to understand complex platform architectures and the communication skills to effectively engage with stakeholders can be challenging.
• DevEx platform engineers: These engineers focus on optimizing the developer experience by designing seamless workflows, building intuitive interfaces, creating clear documentation, and providing responsive support. They act as the primary liaison between the platform team and developers, ensuring the platform meets developers' needs and promotes adoption.
• Infrastructure platform engineers: These engineers focus on the back end of the platform, building and managing the underlying infrastructure, integrating tools, and ensuring the platform is secure, reliable, and scalable. They possess deep expertise in infrastructure technologies like Terraform, Kubernetes, and cloud services.

Building a platform engineering team is a multifaceted endeavor that involves more than just assembling a group of engineers. By upskilling existing talent through platform engineering courses and trainings, cultivating a product-centric mindset, fostering collaboration, and addressing key challenges, organizations can create high-performing platform teams that drive innovation, enhance efficiency, and deliver exceptional developer experiences.

What does a platform engineer do?

Often, platform engineers work on the platform team to build an Internal Developer Platform. Platform engineers reported working with CI/CD, Kubernetes, Platform Orchestration, and Infrastructure as Code the most. Platforms are normally built as a layer on top of clusters and infrastructure, streamlining both configuration management and infrastructure orchestration.

You can dive deeper into the platform engineer’s role by reading the full report.

Platform engineering tools

An Internal Developer Platform is the sum of all tech and tools that a platform engineering team binds together to pave a golden path. Developers leverage this path to self-serve with low cognitive load.

The graphic above illustrates some examples of relevant tooling categories that can be used to build an Internal Developer Platform. All of these tools can be combined in different ways to form the backbone of an Internal Developer Platform.

Platform Engineering vs. SRE

Platform engineering is not the same as SRE. According to Benjamin Treynor Sloss, SREs are responsible for the “availability, latency, performance, efficiency, change management, monitoring, emergency response and capacity planning of their service(s).” They use SLOs to set shared expectations for performance and error budgets to balance reliability and innovation.

While SREs focus on the reliability of the production environment, platform engineers focus on building an Internal Developer Platform to enable developer self-service with low cognitive load.

Join the Platform Engineering Community

As platform engineering grows in popularity, more organizations are seeking resources and best practices for platforming their setups. Here are some free resources that can help:

• The Platform Engineering Slack has over 23k active members located around the world. With community-built channels for product managers, Kubernetes enthusiasts, and job seekers, Slack is the heart of the global community. Platform practitioners share their war stories, share advice, and discuss best practices with folks around the world.
• Local Meetup Groups. Members in cities like Austin, London, Bangalore, New York City, and Tel Aviv have hosted over 100 meetups to date. You can watch the recordings of those talks on platformengineering.org and the Platform Engineering YouTube channel.
• Platform Weekly is a community-driven email newsletter that delivers bite-sized pieces of the best of the platform engineering and cloud-native worlds, straight to folks’ inboxes.
• PlatformCon 2024 made history: 150 talks, 80+ hours of recordings, 30k+ attendees. Register for PlatformCon 2025, the platform engineering conference now!

‍