Platform Engineering

While developer relations typically focus on external developer customers, platform engineers are building services to better serve the needs of internal application and operations developers. An evolution of business agility and DevOps, platform engineering looks to break down more cross-organizational silos, while reducing the cognitive load of application teams and duplicate work. This is usually achieved via the creation of the internal developer platform or IDP.

Read on to learn what platform engineering is, when it’s needed, and how to leverage it to increase team velocity without increasing developer burnout.

Where Did Platform Engineering Come from?

DevOps looks to create application teams that are able to build, test, release, maintain and operate a single domain. But, the further down the stack you go, you’ll find a lot of cross-company duplicate effort. Because application teams were built to more rapidly deliver value to end users — not to learn how to orchestrate Kubernetes, to spin up multicloud environments or to worry about security and compliance. As a maintainer of platform-as-a-product framework Kratix Abigail Bangser put it, these are non-differentiating activities, but not unimportant ones. And, as the tech industry moves more cloud native, they are extra burdens for release teams.

In comes the internal developer platform team to the rescue! Platform engineering is the discipline of building workflows, toolchains, platforms and documentation to support application teams in their delivery of business value. The platform engineering team sits on the horizontal, serving cross-company needs so the vertical application teams’ can serve their end users. It focuses on enabling an application team to get up and running without the cognitive overload and overlap of each team learning to be cloud native. Ideally, it enables them to do it without a human in the loop always having to approve things either.

“One of the goals of platform engineering is to promote self-service to enhance developer velocity and free them from being dependent on people and processes to do their job,” David Melamed, Chief Technology Officer of the Jit DevSecOps orchestration platform, told The New Stack.

A la Netflix’s guardrails not gates, platform engineering teams look to create “golden pathways” where teams are able to choose from a pre-approved selection of tools, resources and compute, to help them get what they need to run their applications. The platform team takes care of the cloud, so app teams don’t have to. But that doesn’t mean they’re off the hook for essentials like security — it’s just these teams now have the pathway to automate and run security tooling.

Getting Started with Platform Engineering

Platform engineering isn’t for every company. In fledgling startups, usually everyone does a bit of everything and that’s OK. But it doesn’t scale. Once you have two or more app teams, you may start to discover duplication of efforts. As you scale up more, so does this repetition. That’s when you might start thinking about hiring a platform engineer to tackle that toil.

There’s no secret recipe to “the platform.” It will vary by organization. The best way to get started on your platform engineering journey is to have a conversation with your engineers. This could kick off with a survey on bottlenecks or developer frustrations or by platform engineering embedding and pair programming within application teams. Some teams, like at