Platform engineering is a modern discipline that has emerged to address the infrastructure complexities of the Cloud Native world, allowing application developers to spend more time developing. It focuses on building internal developer platforms (IDPs) that streamline workflows, toolchains, and infrastructure management for application developers and operations teams. Providing the IDP is developed correctly and follows solid architecture principles, tremendous value will be added to the respective teams by removing a large chunk of infrastructure responsibility from their scope.
Platform engineering should be considered different from DevOps, which empowers teams to independently manage the entire software and infrastructure lifecycle. In contrast, platform engineering alleviates the burden of managing complex cloud infrastructure, security, and compliance. By centralising these responsibilities, platform engineers enable faster, more consistent software delivery, reducing cognitive load and minimising duplicate efforts for application developers, operations and SRE teams.
The core goal of platform engineering is to create self-service tools that application developers can use to rapidly deploy, manage, and secure their applications on stable and tested cloud infrastructure without needing help or intervention from another engineer. This approach frees up application developers’ time. It allows them to focus on delivering value through developing application code while maintaining compliance and security standards, without each application developer having to reinvent the wheel when deploying their cloud infrastructure.