Platform engineering

Platform engineering is a software engineering discipline that focuses on building toolchains and self-service workflows for the use of developers. Platform engineering is about creating a shared platform for software engineers using computer code.

Platform engineering uses multiple components to try to be reliable and scalable. These components can include configuration management, infrastructure orchestration, and role-based access control, with deployment management specifically for continuous delivery or continuous deployment.

The discipline has been associated with DevOps and platform as a service practices.

Purpose & Impact
Platform engineering aims to improve software engineering productivity by creating streamlined toolchains that can be used by developers. It can be used for digital transformation, or to expand CI/CD setups.

According to a panel of experts at PlatformCon 2024, it was stated that building an internal developer platform can improve more than just developer productivity.Platform engineering, which centralizes best practices and components for development teams, is gaining prominence as DevSecOps practices and frameworks become increasingly embedded across organizations. Platform engineering aims to normalize and standardize developer workflows by providing developers with optimized “golden paths” for most of their workloads and flexibility to define exceptions for the rest. Organizations can follow one of two paths when developing a new platform engineering initiative. One option is to build an authentication and visualization layer that sits across multiple point tools — but this does not solve the underlying problems of legacy technology stacks and tooling silos. Therefore it’s not likely a long-term solution. Second option is to implement an internal developer platform (IDP) that reduces the cognitive load on developers by bringing multiple technologies and tools into a single self-service experience.

Platform engineering’s benefits include faster time to market, reduced security and compliance risk, and improved developer experience. Establishing a product-oriented culture and setting clear business goals are critical for success in platform engineering. Therefore it can be stated that platform engineering has increased importance wherever businesses strive to do more with less.