What is platform engineering?
Platform engineering is a discipline within software development that focuses on improving productivity, application cycle time, and speed to market. The overarching goal of platform engineering is to identify the pain points impacting development teams and mitigate them by providing common, reusable tools and capabilities via an internal developer platform (IDP).
Platform engineering should be considered a multidisciplinary approach to improving work culture and productivity, and positively impacting the bottom line. From a business perspective, platform engineering programs streamline application time-to-market, optimize operations, and improve efficiencies in development, deployment, management, and maintenance of applications. From a cultural perspective, platform engineering aims to improve collaboration between teams and mitigate cognitive load by providing developers with the tools and support they need to focus on the most important parts of their job.
What is the role of platform engineering?
The role of platform engineering is to benefit organizations by encouraging consistency and efficiency. It fosters better collaboration among teams and reduces the learning curve for new team members by enabling more efficient cross-team cooperation. Platform engineering can be a specific job role as well as a discipline or methodology that a group of individuals take on as a team initiative.
At its core, platform engineering aims to reduce time required for administrative tasks that can hamper developer productivity and create bottlenecks in the application lifecycle.
How do platform engineers guide developers?
Platform engineers and platform engineering teams are responsible for managing infrastructure and creating a set of tools that guide developers through a workflow that is designed to cater to their needs–sometimes known as a “Golden Path.”
The customized set of tools and processes that platform engineers curate will match the unique needs of an organization through self-service capabilities and automated infrastructure that empowers software developers. This adaptability keeps developers from being constrained by one-size-fits-all solutions and allows them to work with tools that best suit their project requirements. At the same time, this reduces the need for developers to learn new skill sets and undertake superfluous work, allowing them to focus on what they do best: code.
Platform engineering teams also ensure that robust governance frameworks are in place to maintain control over resources, security, and compliance across all environments. This has the additional benefit of giving organizations a more hands-on way to monitor performance, track costs, and identify potential risks or vulnerabilities.
Backstage with platform engineering. Video duration: 2:31
Red Hat resources
What is an internal developer platform?
An internal developer platform (IDP) is a standardized set of self-service tools and technologies that developers need to create, deploy, and maintain code throughout the entire lifecycle of an application. The toolchains integrated into an IDP enable a more positive and productive workflow for developers, focus on factors such as security and scalability, and ultimately help businesses create more customer value.
Platform engineering vs DevOps
DevOps is an approach to software development that organizations use to combine development and IT operations functions into iterative workflows. Platform engineering is more about creating the internal platforms and tools that support those workflows.
Platform engineering helps establish a set of standardized tools, knowledge, services, and processes that can serve many development teams across the organization. With curated platforms, development teams can build, deploy, own, and support their components while the platform team builds, deploys, owns, and supports the platform components.
DevOps practices encourage developers to seek out, learn, deploy, and manage software themselves–thus giving them more insight and control over the software in production.
The adoption of DevOps and continuous delivery have resulted in longer pipelines and toolchains; and with the added pressure of “shifting left” (having an end-to-end understanding of securing each stage of the workflow when creating and maintaining an application) developers have become responsible for understanding more and more of the intricacies involved in the applications they’re building.
This autonomy may produce responsibility and cognitive load that doesn’t serve the individual nor the organization at the end of the day.
By placing more emphasis on empathy and user journey, platform engineering as a strategy builds upon DevOps by finding better ways to automate application delivery, improve collaboration and communication, reduce error, enhance security and compliance, increase efficiency, and most importantly, refocus the strengths of developers where the focus is most needed.
How does platform engineering empower developers?
Platform engineering offloads the responsibility for infrastructure from developers. This is particularly necessary in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Traditionally, it’s been the job of the developer to either find a tool that works for what they need, or build that tool from scratch. While previous, more basic iterations of technology had supported this job expectation, present-day developers at enterprise level organizations have found that as a business grows, supporting users and scaling effectively gets more complex and fragmented.
A platform engineer creates an effective IDP by actively looking for friction in the developer experience and curating tools and technologies that can remove or ease that friction. Begin with a minimalistic approach, only incorporating tools that you know will be beneficial to your development team. From there, incrementally expand the capabilities to evolve alongside the needs of your development team, seeking feedback along the way.
Platform engineer vs site reliability engineer (SRE)
A site reliability engineer (SRE) handles the underlying IT infrastructure, and SRE teams develop process and automation to ensure infrastructure integrity and maintain uptime. SREs and platform engineers share goals but while SRE focuses on software performance, reliability, and scale, platform engineering focuses on systems targeted at enhancing the developer experience.
Both platform engineering and site reliability engineering are about creating and maintaining systems. The difference between the two concepts lies in the focus of each practice.
What are the major challenges to platform engineering?
Platform engineering succeeds only when the platform is treated as a product and the internal developers are treated as customers. The adoption of platform engineering fails most frequently when organizations treat it as a rigid IT mandate rather than a product built for their internal developers. If an engineering team were to build an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) without understanding real developer pain points, developers would most likely bypass the platform to maintain their velocity.
Similarly, an organization can under- or over-engineer a platform. Platform engineering is not just spinning up a developer portal UI (like Backstage). Deeper infrastructure automation and orchestration are required to make self-service meaningful. Similarly, over-engineering a platform for every potential future use case will result in massive complexity and a steep learning curve.
Furthermore, platform teams face a massive technical challenge in consolidating fragmented tooling and enterprise complexity into streamlined, automated workflows. Shifting this complexity away from application developers requires ongoing abstraction and maintenance, which can quickly overwhelm an under-resourced team.
To overcome these roadblocks, successful organizations shift to a strict "product mindset," launching a Thinnest Viable Platform (TVP) that solves a single, acute engineering bottleneck first. By partnering with a vocal pilot group of developers to design these initial workflows, they create seamless, self-service "Golden Paths" that engineers actively choose to use. Rather than forcing adoption, they make using the platform the path of least resistance, leveraging organic internal success to gradually scale infrastructure automation across the enterprise.
Red Hat’s role in platform engineering
Red Hat® OpenShift® and Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite provide a comprehensive platform engineering solution for the entire software development lifecycle. Red Hat OpenShift provides a robust foundation for deploying, managing, and scaling applications in production, and Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite empowers platform teams to boost developer productivity, reduce risk, and enable AI-powered development—supporting both immediate operational gains and long-term transformation. Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite further extends Red Hat OpenShift with an internal developer portal and trusted software supply chain to deliver a comprehensive internal developer platform (IDP).
State of platform engineering in the age of AI
This detail provides a comprehensive review of the State of Platform Engineering in the Age of AI survey, conducted by Illuminas. Explore the details.
