What Is Platform Engineering?
Platform engineering is a discipline focused on creating and managing scalable software development platforms. It involves designing, building, and maintaining the infrastructure and tools necessary for software development teams to deploy and manage applications.
This field combines elements of software engineering, system administration, and operational best practices to support development workflows, ensuring that developers have access to the resources they need with minimal barriers.
The goal of platform engineering is to enhance developer productivity and operational efficiency by providing a cohesive environment that supports the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC). This includes automating build processes, managing deployments, ensuring scalability, monitoring performance, and facilitating collaboration among development teams.
By abstracting away the complexities associated with infrastructure management, platform engineering allows developers to focus on writing code and delivering value more quickly.
This is part of a series of articles about developer experience.
How Platform Engineering Works
Platform engineers aim to offer a unified platform that integrates all necessary tools and services required by developers and operations teams. They achieve this through the creation of self-service portals and automated pipelines, which allow developers to access resources, deploy applications, and manage infrastructure without needing deep expertise in underlying technologies.
Platform engineering requires continuous collaboration between platform teams and their end users—primarily developers. Platform teams gather feedback to understand developer needs, identify common pain points, and prioritize features that deliver the most value.
By focusing on these user-driven requirements, they can tailor the platform to support efficient workflows, encourage best practices, and enable faster software delivery.
Platform Engineering vs DevOps: What Is the Difference?
Platform engineering focuses on creating a foundation of tools and services that simplify and speed up the development process, providing developers with an integrated environment that supports coding, deployment, and management tasks. It emphasizes building a powerful infrastructure where teams can deploy software reliably.
DevOps is a broader cultural movement that seeks to improve collaboration between development and operations teams. Its goal is to accelerate the delivery of software by automating the software development lifecycle, fostering a culture of continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD), and encouraging shared responsibility for product quality.
While platform engineering provides the technical means to achieve these objectives, DevOps aligns team behaviors and practices towards achieving better workflows.
Platform Engineering Use Cases
Automated Infrastructure Provisioning
Platform engineering enables automated infrastructure provisioning by creating self-service workflows for developers. This typically involves Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform or AWS CloudFormation, which allow teams to define, provision, and manage infrastructure through code. By automating the provisioning process, platform engineers ensure that developers can access the resources they need—such as virtual machines, storage, or networking components—without requiring manual intervention from operations teams.
This approach significantly reduces the time it takes to spin up environments, lowers the risk of configuration errors, and ensures that infrastructure is consistent across different environments. Automation also makes it easier to scale resources on demand, which is essential for modern applications that need to handle variable workloads.
Kubernetes Cluster Management
Kubernetes plays a crucial role in modern platform engineering by providing a framework for orchestrating containerized applications. Platform engineering teams often manage Kubernetes clusters to ensure they are highly available, secure, and scalable. By offering a managed Kubernetes platform, developers can focus on deploying and managing their containerized applications, while the platform team handles the underlying complexity of managing the cluster.
Key aspects of Kubernetes cluster management in platform engineering include setting up automated scaling, handling service discovery, managing secrets, and monitoring cluster health. These tasks ensure that developers can deploy and manage containers without worrying about the operational challenges of managing Kubernetes infrastructure.
Observability and Monitoring
Observability and monitoring are integral to maintaining a reliable software platform. Platform engineers implement observability tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and Datadog to provide developers and operations teams with insights into the performance of applications and infrastructure. These tools collect and analyze metrics, logs, and traces, helping teams identify bottlenecks, troubleshoot issues, and optimize performance.
By providing a unified observability stack, platform engineering ensures that teams have a clear view of the system’s health and can react quickly to issues. Additionally, automated alerts and dashboards help ensure that potential problems are detected and addressed before they impact end users.
Policy as Code for Compliance
Compliance and security are critical concerns in software development, particularly in highly regulated industries. Platform engineering addresses these concerns by implementing “Policy as Code” frameworks. This involves defining security, compliance, and governance policies in a machine-readable format, using tools like Open Policy Agent (OPA) or HashiCorp Sentinel.
By codifying policies, platform engineers can enforce compliance checks automatically during the development and deployment processes. This ensures that applications adhere to security best practices and regulatory requirements without slowing down development cycles. Policies can cover various aspects such as resource usage limits, network security rules, and data protection requirements.
Developer Experience Enhancement
One of the primary goals of platform engineering is to improve the developer experience by reducing friction in the development process. This is achieved by creating self-service platforms, integrating developer tools, and automating routine tasks like testing, building, and deploying applications. By abstracting away infrastructure complexity, platform engineering allows developers to focus on writing code and shipping features, rather than managing environments or debugging deployment pipelines.
Improved developer experience leads to increased productivity, faster release cycles, and higher job satisfaction. With platform engineering, teams can move away from manual processes and towards streamlined workflows that encourage experimentation and innovation.
Platform Engineering Challenges
Organizations and developers should also be aware of the challenges facing platform teams:
- Balancing standardization and flexibility: Standardization simplifies workflows and reduces complexity, making it easier for developers to navigate the development process. However, too much standardization can stifle creativity and limit developers’ ability to experiment with new technologies or approaches that could benefit projects. Platform engineering teams must implement frameworks that are flexible enough to allow for customization and experimentation within a standardized environment.
- Scaling infrastructure: Platform engineers must design systems that can adapt to varying loads and requirements without manual intervention. This means implementing auto-scaling capabilities for resources such as servers, databases, and services to meet the demands of development and production environments dynamically. However, implementing this scalability is challenging and often requires special expertise and added costs.
- Managing multi-tenancy: Platform engineers often aim to create environments where multiple users, teams, or projects can operate independently within the same infrastructure. This requires implementing adequate isolation to ensure that each tenant’s data and applications are secure and cannot interfere with others. It’s also important to prevent any single user from monopolizing shared resources, such as compute power, storage, and network bandwidth.
Platform Engineering Best Practices
Here are some of the ways that organizations and platform engineering teams can help ensure the success of their platform engineering projects.
Focus on Developer Experience
Platform engineering aims to create an environment that is intuitive and frictionless for developers. This means providing tools, documentation, and support that enable developers to perform their tasks with minimal obstacles. An optimal developer experience reduces the time to understand and use platform features and accelerates development cycles.
By prioritizing usability and accessibility in platform design, engineering teams can ensure that developers can leverage the full potential of the platform with ease. In addition to the technical aspects, platform teams should seek input from developers to understand their challenges and preferences. They can then Implement changes based on this feedback.
Implement Observability
Observability tools and practices provide visibility into the system’s internal states. This is achieved by collecting, analyzing, and acting upon data from logs, metrics, and traces. Observability allows platform teams to understand how the system behaves in production, identify issues in real time, and troubleshoot problems.
Observability also aids in optimizing system performance and improving user experience. By analyzing data collected from various parts of the system, engineers can pinpoint inefficiencies, detect patterns leading to failure, and make informed decisions on enhancing system reliability and performance.
Ensure Security and Compliance
Platform engineering must integrate security practices throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC). This means embedding security checks and balances in the early stages of development, automating vulnerability scans, and enforcing compliance standards across all deployments.
By proactively addressing security concerns, platform teams can reduce vulnerabilities and mitigate risks, ensuring that applications are secure by design. To support compliance with regulatory standards, platform engineering teams must implement mechanisms for data encryption, access control, and audit logging.
Design for Scalability and Reliability
The systems created by the platform engineering team must be able handle growth and change gracefully while maintaining high performance. Scalability ensures that the platform can accommodate increasing numbers of users, workloads, or transactions without degradation in service quality. Reliability ensures that the system remains operational and consistent over time, even in the face of failures or unexpected conditions.
Engineering teams should use scalable architectures like microservices, which allow components to be scaled independently based on demand. They should implement monitoring to detect issues impacting performance or availability, and automation to support the rapid scaling of resources and recovery from failures. Load balancing, auto-scaling groups, and redundancy help maintain a resilient infrastructure.
Ensure Flexibility with APIs
Platform engineering should consider how systems adapt to changing development needs. By exposing functionalities through well-designed APIs, platforms can offer developers the flexibility to integrate custom tools, services, or third-party applications. This allows for the creation of tailored development environments that can quickly adapt to new requirements or technologies.
APIs also enable interoperability between different components and services within the platform, enhancing collaboration. They support a more agile development process by allowing developers to experiment with new features or updates in isolation before full-scale implementation.
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