DevOps taught teams to own what they build and run. But as cloud-native stacks grew more complex, many developers found themselves spending more time on pipelines, Kubernetes manifests and cloud permissions than on product features. Platform engineering is the response: a dedicated team builds an internal developer platform (IDP) that makes the right way the easy way.
What is platform engineering?
Platform engineering treats internal infrastructure and tooling as a product, with developers as the customers. The platform team provides self-service capabilities — creating a new service, provisioning a database, deploying to production — through “golden paths” that bake in security, compliance and operational best practice.
What an internal developer platform includes
- Developer portal — a single place to discover services, documentation and owners, often built with Backstage.
- Service templates — scaffold a new service with repo, CI/CD, observability and security already wired in.
- CI/CD pipelines — standardised, reusable pipelines with automated testing and security scanning.
- Infrastructure as code — self-service provisioning through Terraform or similar modules with guardrails.
- Runtime platform — usually Kubernetes or serverless, with sensible defaults for scaling and networking.
- Observability — logs, metrics and traces available by default for every service.
- Security & compliance — secrets management, policy as code and software supply-chain controls.
Signs you need a platform team
- Every team builds its own pipelines and infrastructure differently.
- Onboarding a new developer or service takes weeks.
- Security and compliance reviews are manual bottlenecks.
- Senior engineers spend a large share of time on undifferentiated infrastructure work.
Building a platform step by step
- Interview your developers. Find the most painful, most frequent tasks.
- Pave one golden path. For example, “create and deploy a new web service” end to end.
- Measure adoption and outcomes. Track lead time, deployment frequency, change failure rate and time to restore (the DORA metrics), plus developer satisfaction.
- Iterate like a product. Add capabilities based on demand, and keep paths optional but attractive.
- Avoid over-building. Use managed services and open-source components; build only the glue that’s specific to you.
Platform engineering and AI
Internal platforms are also becoming the foundation for AI delivery: shared access to models, prompt and evaluation tooling, vector databases and guardrails, offered through the same self-service patterns. Building your AI platform on top of your developer platform avoids a second, disconnected toolchain.
Our DevOps consulting team helps organisations design and build internal developer platforms on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.
Frequently asked questions
Is platform engineering replacing DevOps?
No. Platform engineering builds on DevOps principles by providing self-service tools and golden paths so product teams can practise DevOps without each building their own infrastructure.
What is a golden path?
A golden path is a supported, well-documented and automated way to do a common task — such as creating and deploying a new service — with security and best practices built in.
What is Backstage?
Backstage is an open-source framework for building developer portals, originally created at Spotify and now a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project.