Platform engineering is the practice of building internal developer platforms that abstract infrastructure and recurring concerns so that product engineering teams can ship faster. The platform team treats developers as customers of an internal product.
Platform engineering is distinct from DevOps and from SRE. DevOps is a cultural movement; SRE is a reliability discipline; platform engineering is a product approach to internal infrastructure. The deliverable is a platform with users, not just a pipeline.
Good platform engineering produces leverage. One small platform team can multiply the velocity of every product team in the organization. Bad platform engineering produces an internal product no one wants to use, and the product teams build around it.
Why Platform engineering Matters for Distributed Teams
Platform engineering is one of the highest-leverage investments an engineering organization can make. Done well, it lifts the entire org. Done poorly, it adds a layer of bureaucracy without solving the underlying friction.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is platform engineering?
Platform engineering is the practice of building internal developer platforms that let product teams ship faster. The platform team treats developers as internal customers and builds tooling, abstractions, and self-service infrastructure as a product.
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