Which Organizations Need a Platform Engineering Team?
Platform engineering isn’t essential for every organization. However, if your company fits any of the following criteria, you’re likely facing significant challenges without a dedicated platform engineering team:
1. Organizations with Multiple Development Teams (Scaling Development Teams)
Problem: In companies with several development teams, each team often has its own tools, CI/CD processes, and deployment environments. This leads to inconsistencies, duplicated efforts, and reduced efficiency.
Need: A platform engineering team can unify these processes and free developers from dealing with infrastructure complexities.
Example:
• If you have more than 5–10 development teams working on different services, platform engineering can be a game changer.
2. Organizations with a Microservices Architecture and Autonomous Development Teams
Problem: In many organizations, the DevOps or SRE team is responsible for infrastructure, CI/CD, and deployments. However, when development teams are autonomous and want to deploy services without depending on DevOps, the DevOps team can become a bottleneck.
Need: A platform engineering team can build self-service tools that allow developers to deploy their services independently.
Example:
• If your development teams prefer not to rely on DevOps for every deployment or infrastructure change, a platform team is crucial.
• If your services are evolving rapidly and the DevOps team struggles to keep up, a platform engineering team can help.
3. Organizations Using Kubernetes and Multi-Cluster
Problem: If your company uses Kubernetes—especially across multiple data centers or cloud providers—managing this infrastructure can become highly complex.
Need: A platform engineering team can abstract Kubernetes complexities, allowing developers to deploy applications without worrying about infrastructure details.
Example:
• If your company operates multiple Kubernetes clusters across on-prem and cloud environments (AWS, GCP, Azure), platform engineering is a necessity.
4. Hyper-Growth Companies
Problem: Startups experiencing rapid growth quickly face scalability challenges, team coordination issues, and infrastructure management difficulties.
Need: A platform engineering team can establish standardized development and deployment practices early on to prevent infrastructure chaos.
Example:
• If your developer headcount has tripled in the past 1–2 years, a platform team can help maintain stability and prevent operational bottlenecks.
5. Organizations in Regulated Industries (Security & Compliance)
Problem: In industries with strict security and compliance requirements (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2), enforcing organization-wide security standards without a central team is difficult.
Need: A platform engineering team can build a secure and compliant infrastructure.
Example:
• If you need organization-wide logging, access control, and security testing, a platform team can streamline compliance efforts.
6. Organizations with Shared Services Models
Problem: Some companies have multiple teams relying on shared services like authentication systems, databases, messaging queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ), and API gateways. Without centralized management, this can lead to inconsistency, access issues, and downtime.
Need: A platform engineering team can manage shared services as internal products, ensuring smooth access for all teams.
Example:
• If multiple teams rely on shared services like Identity Management, CI/CD, or Monitoring, a platform team can enhance the developer experience.
7. Organizations Separating Developers from Operations (Reducing Ops Burden on Developers)
Problem: When developers spend too much time managing infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and environment configurations, it takes focus away from coding and building new features.
Need: A platform engineering team can provide self-service capabilities, allowing developers to deploy and manage their applications without infrastructure complexities.
Example:
• If developers need to contact DevOps for every small infrastructure change or deployment, a platform team can automate and simplify this process.
8. Organizations with Complex Development Environments
Problem: Some organizations have multiple development, testing, and staging environments, which can be difficult and time-consuming to manage.
Need: A platform engineering team can build Internal Developer Portals (IDPs) that allow teams to quickly spin up environments without infrastructure dependencies.
Example:
• If your company has multiple development, staging, QA, and production environments that are becoming difficult to manage, a platform team can simplify the process.
9. Organizations Looking to Optimize Infrastructure Costs
Problem: Managing and optimizing resources in on-premises or cloud-native environments can be challenging, leading to high operational costs.
• On-premises challenges: Inefficient resource allocation, underutilized hardware, and a lack of auto-scaling mechanisms can increase hardware costs.
• Cloud challenges: Uncontrolled resource consumption and improper auto-scaling can result in unexpectedly high bills.
Need: A platform engineering team can implement FinOps strategies for cost monitoring and control in the cloud. For on-prem environments, they can optimize resource allocation, implement internal auto-scaling, and manage capacity efficiently.
Example:
• If your on-prem servers aren’t running at full capacity, a platform team can optimize workloads and implement auto-scaling to reduce hardware purchases.
• If your AWS, Azure, or GCP bills are growing unpredictably, a platform team can introduce cost monitoring and resource optimization strategies.
10. Organizations with Multiple Data Centers Requiring Disaster Recovery & High Availability
Problem: Companies operating across multiple physical or cloud-based data centers (AWS, Azure, GCP) must ensure service continuity in case of outages, hardware failures, or network disruptions. Managing global service distribution, failover strategies, and disaster recovery (DR) processes requires specialized expertise.
Need: A platform engineering team can design high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) architectures. This includes automated failover, geo-replication, intelligent traffic distribution, and coordination across on-prem and cloud environments.
Example:
• If your company operates multiple data centers and requires seamless failover during outages, you need Global Load Balancing, Multi-Cluster Kubernetes, and other advanced infrastructure strategies—areas where a platform engineering team excels.
Conclusion:
Platform engineering isn’t just a trend—it’s a necessity for organizations dealing with infrastructure complexity, developer productivity challenges, and scalability issues. If your organization fits any of the scenarios above, investing in a Platform Engineering team could be the key to unlocking efficiency, reliability, agility and growth.
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