What is Platform Engineering?
At its heart, Platform Engineering is the practice of building and maintaining internal developer platforms (IDPs). Think of it as creating a "paved road" for your developers. This road handles the tricky parts of deployment, infrastructure, and observability, allowing developers to focus on what they do best: writing code and shipping features.
Instead of developers needing to manually configure Kubernetes, set up monitoring with Prometheus, and manage CI/CD pipelines, a platform team builds a cohesive internal tool that automates these tasks. The developer simply pushes code to a repo, and the platform handles the rest.
The Shift from DevOps to a Self-Service Model
For years, DevOps was the dominant methodology for improving workflows. The goal was to break down the wall between developers and operations. In practice, this often led to developers becoming responsible for a growing list of operational tasks they were never trained for.
Platform Engineering takes the lessons of DevOps and applies them more strategically. It's not about making every developer an ops expert. It’s about a dedicated platform team empowering all developers with:
Faster Development Cycles: Developers can provision new services in minutes, not days.
Reduced Cognitive Load: With one standard platform, developers don't have to remember the unique details of every deployment or monitoring system.
Enhanced Reliability: A centralized platform team can bake best-in-class security, scalability, and observability practices directly into the tools.
The End of "It Works on My Machine"
One of the most persistent frustrations in software development is inconsistency between environments. An IDP built by a platform team solves this by providing a standardized, repeatable environment for everyone.
For example, a platform might offer a command like platform create-service --template=api that provisions a new service with all the necessary infrastructure, CI/CD, and monitoring baked in. This ensures consistency and reliability from the very first line of code.
Getting Started with Platform Engineering
You don't need a massive team to get started. You can begin by treating a small, shared set of automation scripts as your "platform."
Identify a shared pain point: Find a repetitive, manual task that all developers on your team dread. This could be anything from local environment setup to deploying a specific type of service.
Automate the solution: Write a script or create a small internal CLI to solve that one problem.
Treat it like a product: Document your tool, gather feedback from your team, and iterate on it.
This small, iterative approach builds the momentum and buy-in you need to prove the value of a platform.
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