What is Platform Engineering?

Platform Engineering Definition

The next step in DevOps practices. Platform Engineering moves us forward from the concept of “you build it, you run it”.

Organisations can empower their engineering teams to build Internal Development Platforms (IDPs) while developing organisational-wide standards and choosing the best tooling and workflows for their software development processes.

Platform Engineering Explained

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.

As businesses increasingly adopt Cloud Native practices, platform engineering is set to become a critical part of software development. Their current engineering teams will be forced to learn new workflows, tooling, and practices, highlighting the future reliance businesses will have on well-architected Internal Developer Platforms. Gartner predicts that 80% of engineering organisations will have dedicated platform engineering teams by 2026.

Platform Engineering Benefits

Increased velocity

Application developers can get up and running quickly without dealing with complex infrastructure.

Cost savings

Reduces duplicated workloads and streamlines cloud cost monitoring, supporting FinOps practices.

Environment replication

Teams can easily create, replicate, and update both production and non-production environments, enabling faster delivery through the route to live.

Reduced complexity

Abstracts infrastructure management, allowing app teams to focus on delivering customer value.

Adopt company standards

The IDP will enforce updated inner source practices aligned with industry standards, ensuring application developers follow consistent, high-quality infrastructure standards when developing code.

Improved onboarding

New application developers can contribute within minutes, speeding up the onboarding process.

Developer satisfaction

Frees application developers from mundane tasks, making their work more meaningful.

Security and compliance

Centralised governance ensures security and compliance are maintained at scale.

How we partner for Platform Engineering success

At LiveWyer, we partner closely with clients to ensure the success of their platform engineering initiatives by seamlessly integrating our pods of engineers with their teams. Whether supplementing existing resources or addressing specific challenges, our experts leverage Cloud Native tools and a scalable approach to architecture. We specialise in delivering Kubernetes as a Service (KaaS) platforms, which help deploy, manage, and maintain Kubernetes clusters, offering self-service deployment, upgrades, and multi-cloud portability. Combining our expertise with your vision enhances scalability, reduces complexity, and drives business value through a collaborative approach.

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