What is ‘Platform Engineering’?
Platform Engineering is the discipline of building toolchains that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations in the cloud-native era.
As Gartner describes “Platform engineering improves developer experience and productivity by providing self-service capabilities with automated infrastructure operations.”
Platform engineering is trending because of its promise to optimize the developer experience and accelerate product teams’ delivery of customer value.
Gartner expects that by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams as internal providers of reusable services, components and tools for application delivery.
Platform engineering will ultimately solve the central problem of cooperation between software developers and operators.
IDP: Internal Developer Platform
In the feature video dive into the wide world of platform engineering with Luca Galante from the platform engineering community. Learn the exact definition, the key differences between platform engineering, DevOps and SRE and explore the benefits and challenges for you and your organisation.
Platform engineering is the discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations in the cloud-native era. Platform engineers provide an integrated product most often referred to as an “Internal Developer Platform” covering the operational necessities of the entire lifecycle of an application.
Writing on Linkedin Jyoti Bansal expands on this, describing how enterprises face a significant challenge, and also opportunity, that of developer inefficiency. Notably this is headlined by Platform Engineering, and the rise of ‘IDPs’ – Internal Developer Platforms:
“In simplified terms, think of this as the difference between DOS and Windows. Instead of laboriously creating environments, good IDPs give developers a premade set of tools, processes and services. These platforms will be newly relevant as companies look to cut costs, and they’ll also become more robust and turnkey.”
In this New Stack webinar, with Kaspar Von Grünberg, founder and CEO of Humanitec, they define that Platform engineering “is the art of designing and binding all of the different tech and tools that you have inside of an organization into a golden path that enables self service for developers and reduces cognitive load.”
This is structure is important for individual contributors, Grünberg said, as well as backend engineers: “if you look at the operation teams, it reduces their burden to do repetitive things. And so platform engineers build and design internal developer platforms, and help and serve users. “
