What is platform engineering and its role in modern IT

Platform engineering transforms how development teams operate. Its core idea, self-service, enables developers to leverage maintained sets of tools, services, and workflows that are centralized and unified across an organization. This translates into faster deployment, better scalability, and improved developer satisfaction.

Our comprehensive overview explores how platform engineering addresses critical inefficiencies within modern organizations, enhances developer productivity, and provides a framework for scaling operations with confidence. Whether you’re aiming to enhance scalability, shorten time-to-market, or reduce developer cognitive load, platform engineering is the solution you may want to consider.

What is platform engineering?

Platform engineering focuses on building and maintaining internal developer platforms (IDPs) that improve developer experience (DX) and developer productivity. It aims to simplify the complexity of an organization’s infrastructure, tools, and environments, enabling developers to create applications and services without needing to manage the underlying infrastructure. 

Platform engineering helps significantly reduce costs by shortening time to market, optimizing resource utilization, and increasing return on investment (ROI). It also enables scalable development operations and rapid adaption to new business needs or technologies, supporting business growth. 

Let’s take a look at how platform engineering helps developers and businesses alike.

What challenges does platform engineering address?

Modern software development has evolved into multiple disciplines instead of just writing application code. It now involves managing complex infrastructure, services, and cloud environments. 

The 2024 Dynatrace Report says developers spend just 40% of their time on proactive tasks. If your developers have to spend much time figuring out the technicalities of deploying and hosting applications, they will get frustrated, or possibly leave the organization. The report also shows that 36% of developers resign due to bad developer experience. In the worst-case scenario, app development teams might need to reinvent the infrastructure for each deployment, which could add up to hundreds of times per quarter across the whole organization.

Platform engineering helps organizations empower development teams by creating and maintaining solutions such as internal developer platforms (IDP). IDPs automate and abstract complex infrastructure while providing self-service capabilities. As a result, app development teams save effort by reusing the existing infrastructure instead of reinventing it with each deployment. 

As you can see in the picture below, Puppet’s 2024 State of DevOps report states that 50% of survey participants chose increased productivity as the main benefit of platform engineering. Developers also see better software quality and reduced lead time for deployment when they adopt platform engineering.

But why is platform engineering so effective?

Key capabilities of platform engineering

Let’s take a look at the essential technical functions that are built, managed, and improved with platform engineering. Namely, what makes platform engineering effective in improving developer productivity, developer experience (DX), and scaling operations.

• Infrastructure abstraction helps mitigate the complexity of underlying infrastructure. Platform engineering enables developers to deploy and manage their applications without deep infrastructure domain knowledge.
• Automation and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) reduce bottlenecks and dependencies on the operations team by automating infrastructure provisioning and customization.
• Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines for automated testing, building, and deployment, make the release process faster and more reliable, reducing lead time to production.
• Security and compliance checks embedded in the platform’s workflows ensure vulnerability scanning, hardened security, and proper access control, thus contributing to risk minimization and meeting organizations' compliance requirements.

Developer experience optimization by reducing mental effort and simplifying workflows helps developers onboard quickly and more efficiently.

What’s an internal developer platform?

An internal developer platform, or IDP, is a set of tools, services, and workflows that serve as the backbone of software development and delivery. IDPs simplify development workflows by offering centralized and standardized infrastructure, on which software developers can easily build, test, and deploy their applications. CI/CD pipelines, configured environments, and monitoring tools are available out of the box to all developers across an organization.

Internal developer platforms are built of layers, or modules, glued together. Properly designed internal developer platforms have several key characteristics.

• They are developer-centric, built to improve developer experience and boost developer productivity.
• They offer integrated tools and services, such as CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, logging, and security, for seamless workflows.
• They avoid technical complexity, giving software developers an API, a CLI tool, or a simplified interface for interaction.
• They are customizable to match the unique needs of an organization.

Read more in our success story on how Developer platforms boost compliance and efficiency.

Platform engineering tools

Platform engineering uses a range of tools that must be carefully picked. The choice matters since it defines what developers can do on their own, what is part of the service, and to what extent the infrastructure management is automated. Because of that, each internal developer platform is different. 

However, there are some common types of tools that we want to share.

Platform engineering vs. DevOps

DevOps aims for better collaboration between development and operations teams. While revolutionary, it requires a huge cultural and technical shift and an experienced team that is both hard and expensive to hire. The DevOps team needs certain traits embedded in every single team, including:

• A deep knowledge of tools and automation
• The ability and willingness to learn continuously
• Handle complexity while scaling 

For some organizations, DevOps may be the optimal approach. More mature and highly skilled teams—with the foundational skills, adaptability, and mindset—make the most of it. However, for others, DevOps might be too complicated or simply can’t scale to a large number of teams.

Platform engineering, on the other hand, extends the fundamentals of DevOps by creating reusable environments, policies, and workflows that developers can access on demand. 

The goal of platform engineering is to create golden paths: pre-configured services that meet the organization's compliance and governance standards and allow customization at the same time. Platform engineering with its self-service capabilities results in reducing developers’ cognitive load, and shorter lead time to production.

Platform engineering vs. site reliability engineering (SRE)

Site reliability engineering, or SRE, is all about building resilience into large and complex systems to ensure the solution handles real-world events. It ensures the systems are robustly built and functions are designed to efficiently handle traffic and scale. SRE leverages software engineering approaches to solve operational problems. 

SRE developers aim to build ultra-scalable and highly reliable software systems. Sometimes site reliability engineering goes further and builds tools to simplify processes for developers, stepping into the territory of platform engineering.

Platform engineering complements SRE by providing tools and systems that facilitate easier management of system reliability. By offering efficient and reliable platforms, platform engineering aids SRE teams in optimizing performance and seamlessly managing system functions.

Benefits of platform engineering for organizations

Scaling infrastructure, reducing developer cognitive load, and ensuring resilient, highly available systems are some of the biggest challenges modern organizations face. If this sounds familiar, you might consider platform engineering as your go-to solution. Let’s explore the key benefits platform engineering brings to organizations.

Enhancing scalability, reliability, and resilience

As companies grow, the complexity of managing infrastructure manually becomes immense. The decentralized “you built it, you run it” approach, where each team manages its infrastructure, scales inefficiently. At that point, high performance and minimal downtime are critical. 

Platform engineering provides reusable systems and automation that scale with the organization. Moreover, it prioritizes reliability and resilience thus covering various aspects of the software development lifecycle. It brings 

• Standardization of tools and infrastructure
• Self-service capabilities
• Automation at scale
• Built-in security and compliance controls
• Built-in monitoring and observability as default features
• Resilience thanks to Infrastructure-as-Code

Platform engineering uses tools like automated rollbacks aligned with disaster recovery scenarios, and proactive monitoring to prevent small failures from escalating into major outages. This level of reliability reduces the risk of manual errors and allows teams to deploy with confidence. Systems remain stable and available even as the complexity of applications and infrastructure increases.

Improving developer experience (DX) and reducing cognitive load

In large organizations, developers may need to juggle multiple tools, responsibilities, and environments. Platform engineering significantly reduces cognitive load—the mental effort required for a developer to expand their actions outside the core responsibilities of writing code and solving business problems. It helps reduce context switching and decision overload. It frees developers from worries about infrastructure details, by abstracting infrastructure complexity away, automating tasks, and offering golden paths. 

Hardening Security

Platform engineering bakes robust security measures into the software development lifecycle. It ensures that the developed software meets organizational and regulatory requirements, by enforcing standardized policies, bulletproof secret management, role-based access control (RBAC), and compliance checks integrated with CI/CD pipelines. 

On top of that, automated monitoring reduces the risk of misconfigurations and quickly identifies potential threats. This proactive, integrated approach to security helps organizations mitigate risks, protect sensitive data, and ensure system reliability.

The role of platform engineering teams

Platform engineering teams foster collaboration between development and operations, facilitating smooth communication and teamwork to achieve common objectives. When set up correctly, a platform engineering team improves technical cooperation, streamlines processes, and boosts developer productivity, ultimately ensuring the efficient delivery of high-quality software. 

You might think that the primary role of platform engineering teams is simply to connect development and operations. However, this is far from the truth. Their responsibilities extend to providing essential support across key areas.

• Assisting application teams in overcoming challenges
• Accelerating migration efforts
• Maintaining platform infrastructure

The primary goal of platform engineering teams is to promote self-service capabilities for developers. By empowering developers with greater independence, the platform team reduces dependencies on other departments to deliver routine tasks, minimizes bottlenecks, and shortens time to market. 

In the long run, platform engineering teams save both time and money. Their strategic contribution strengthens technical collaboration and lays a solid foundation for continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) within your organization. 

Introducing a product manager to a platform engineering team

At VirtusLab, we specialize in delivering solutions that align with organizational needs, ensuring the organization is supported by the solution, and not the other way around. To fully understand your needs, we integrate product managers into the platform engineering team to guide the platform’s development. 

Product managers explore user challenges through thorough research and build strong connections within the organization. Their primary role is to transform insights into actionable tasks, which is key to a successful platform adoption.

Product managers handle stakeholders, align strategies, and advocate for the platform to decision-makers. By taking on these responsibilities, they free platform engineers from balancing technical work with promotional duties. This creates a focused approach that fosters a harmonious team environment and enables engineers to focus on their core tasks.

The future of platform engineering

Based on our observations, platform engineering is still at the early stage of maturity and continuously sparking more interest. This is especially true among large organizations, which were initially more reluctant to change compared to digital native businesses. 

According to Gartner, around 80% of engineering organizations will have a dedicated platform engineering team by 2026. Whether this is true or not, it clearly indicates that organizations still face challenges in navigating complex technologies and operational complexities. Platform engineering is one viable approach to overcoming these challenges.

In addition to that, data gravitates toward the cloud. At VirtusLab, we see similar emerging trends in data engineering, where companies at the earliest stages of their maturity greatly benefit from platform engineering approaches. It also helps organizations to keep up with recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), enabling these capabilities at scale in a centralized, cost-effective way. 

Conclusion

Platform engineering improves developer experience and productivity by simplifying infrastructure management. IDP implementation enables organizations to enhance scalability, reduce cognitive load, and achieve faster time-to-market while maintaining robust security and compliance at both company and legal levels.

Platform engineering bridges the gap between development and operations. It empowers developers with self-service capabilities, enabling them to focus on what they do best—building high-quality software.

If your organization faces challenges in scaling infrastructure, reducing developer cognitive load, or ensuring resilient and highly available systems, platform engineering may be the ideal solution. From our experience, it’s particularly valuable for companies with large and growing teams that need standardized tools, automated workflows, and reusable infrastructure.