Platform Engineering and Internal Developer Platforms
Platform engineering is the discipline of building and operating the internal developer platform — the shared infrastructure, tooling, and workflows that enable development teams to build, test, and deploy software efficiently. It is the operationalisation of DevOps: instead of every team building their own CI/CD, observability, and deployment infrastructure, a platform team builds reusable, well-supported infrastructure that all teams use.
What an Internal Developer Platform Provides
- Service templates: Standard project structures and CI/CD pipelines for different service types — new services start correctly configured
- Deployment infrastructure: Standard Kubernetes platform with guardrails, default network policies, resource limits, and observability instrumentation
- Self-service infrastructure provisioning: Databases, queues, storage buckets provisioned by developers without infrastructure tickets
- Observability defaults: Every service automatically gets logging, metrics, and tracing without configuration
- Developer portal: Backstage or similar — service catalogue, documentation, runbooks, ownership information
Platform Team Model
Platform teams operate as internal product teams with engineering teams as their customers. Success metrics: developer onboarding time, deployment frequency, mean time to deploy, developer NPS (would you recommend the platform to a colleague?). Platform teams must resist the temptation to build complex platforms that solve hypothetical problems — build for actual developer pain points.