Platform Engineering is the discipline of building and operating self-service internal developer platforms that abstract away infrastructure complexity while empowering development teams with standardized tools, workflows, and automation. By creating curated developer experiences through portals, templates, and APIs, platform engineering enables organizations to scale their development capabilities without proportionally increasing operational overhead. This approach transforms traditional operations teams into product teams that treat infrastructure and developer tooling as internal products, fostering a culture where platform engineers focus on reducing cognitive load for developers while maintaining high standards for security, compliance, and reliability.
Clear ownership boundaries are fundamental to successful platform engineering: platform teams own and evolve the platform as a product with defined interfaces and SLAs, while product teams maintain ownership of their services and consume platform capabilities via self-service interfaces. The platform should encapsulate Day-2 operations capabilities, embedding observability, scaling, security, and resilience patterns directly into the platform so that teams can operate their services effectively from day one. Platform teams provide curated golden paths as default workflows that enable fast and secure delivery while preserving flexibility for teams to deviate from these paths when specific requirements demand alternative approaches.
Platform engineering represents a natural evolution beyond basic DevOps practices, requiring high organizational maturity and expertise to implement effectively. As evidenced from extensive industry research, successful platform engineering initiatives require careful assessment of automation maturity levels, from basic scripting to fully declarative, API-driven approaches with comprehensive orchestration. The discipline emphasizes the importance of building solid foundations in Infrastructure as Code, containerization, and GitOps before introducing portal-based abstractions, ensuring that platform capabilities genuinely enhance rather than complicate existing workflows and enabling organizations to achieve true self-service scalability.