What is platform engineering, and why is it important for scalable DevOps?

The Growth of Platform Engineering

In today’s fast-paced world of cloud-native development, developers must add functionality quickly, without compromising security, scalability, or reliability. However, as development teams grow in size and technologies become more complex, a new issue arises: how can we maintain the speed of engineering while preventing developer exhaustion?

Enter, platform engineering.

The primary focus of platform engineering is to develop and maintain Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs). These are the tools, processes, pipelines, and infrastructure that developers use to satisfy their own operational needs; e.g., deploying applications and accessing cloud resources. Many of these platforms simplify how infrastructure is consumed, meaning developers may spend less time managing pipelines, YAML, and tickets, and spend more time developing code.

Gartner states that by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will have platform teams that create reusable services, components, and tooling for building applications.

— Source

This isn’t merely a trend or new term within DevOps. While traditional DevOps enthusiasts rate high, they rate low on performance when scaled or when there is rapid change. This positions platform engineering as a greater priority for organizations within technology. Things become chaotic when every team is developing its own CI/CD flow, managing its own IaC templates, or establishing its own organizational rules for visibility. Platform engineering doesn’t allow every team to do whatever they please; however, it gives a “golden path,” which is an extensive set of paved roads that still allows people to be free and get things done.

At Improwised, we don’t see platform engineering as a fad; rather, we view it as a mode of thinking that allows businesses to scale, build faster, and be secure. In this blog post, we will discuss what platform engineering is, why it is important, and how to execute it. We will also share some real-world examples and some best practices that you can follow.

What does the discipline of platform engineering do?

The discipline of platform engineering is responsible for creating and managing Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs). An IDP is a cohesive set of tools, services, and processes that allow a development team to quickly, safely, and at scale build, test, and deploy software.

In traditional DevOps, teams need to “build and run everything themselves.” In platform engineering, the most common approaches to establishing infrastructure and providing services are broken down into reusable parts so the developers can work semi autonomously, without the need to establish CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure provisioning, and observability for every new project. CircleCI explains that platform engineering offers developers an “opinionated” path that reduces choice fatigue, standardizes best practices, and provides focus on building things without thinking about tool deviations or extra work for operations.

At Improwised, we help organizations develop and nurture these internal “products” from a product perspective. Which means we understand the developer experience is a corporate asset.

The key points and guidelines

Good platform engineering does not mean adding more layers of bureaucracy. Good platform engineering should lighten developers’ experiences and provide the same software delivery experience.

Key points include:

1. Things you can do yourself, with tools and automation

Developers shouldn’t have to ticket or wait for another team to set up infrastructure, deploy code, or get to logs. Better operations and automation capabilities that are already fit, allow this.

2.”Golden Paths” or Abstraction Layers

A golden path is a way to develop and share software. It is a collection of tooling and processes that are safe and have been tested for performance. Microsoft believes this style allows developers to do things over and over without losing ownership.

3.Observability, Infrastructure-as-Code, and Templating:

Developers can use IaC tools such as Terraform or Pulumi and service templates to build modern systems. Observability is built in, so you are always thinking of monitoring and alerting.

Improwised can help you build these basic things at a level appropriate for your team size, chosen stack, and compliance requirements, to ensure your platform grows at the same pace as your engineering team.

Good platform engineering does not mean adding layers of bureaucracy. Good platform engineering means ensuring the same software delivery experience and equipping developers with proper toolsets.

Why platform engineering is important:

Less mental burden and faster deployment

Engineering leaders already know from experience that using different tools and building their own workflows takes more time for deployment. Platform engineering reduces this cognitive burden by providing consistent interfaces and workflows that are simple to use.

Dynatrace reports that organizations with platform teams have more productive engineers, making fewer mistakes and learn more quickly.

Designing for Safety and Compliance

Policy-as-code, credential management, and environment isolation are some security features that may be included as part of the platform from day one. This preventive approach reduces risk and simplifies audits.

People and Culture

No more “it works on my machine” and no more needing to reinvent the wheel between teams and areas. Platform engineering provides unified paths for deploying, monitoring, and recovering.

Dev Satisfaction and Retention

Engineers want to get work done! A strong foundation accompanied by smooth computing helps retain top talent and diminishes the effects of burnout from consistent working.

When and Who Needs It

The size and stage of the business

Stage	What You Might Have to Deal With	Why Platform Engineering is Good
Startups	It’s easy to use tools, but infrastructure debt is going up.	Make light golden trails in the start so things don’t get messy later.
Mid-sized	Too many tools, pipelines that don’t work right, and challenges with onboarding	Everyone should use the same CI/CD, IaC, and observability procedures.
Enterprises	There are a lot of other teams doing the same thing, and it’s hard to follow the guidelines.	Check that the scale is the same, minimize the risk, and speed up delivery.

You Are Ready When

You have three or more development teams, and each one has a different way of handling infrastructure.

It is difficult for anyone responsible for security and compliance to follow the rules.

There are delivery issues that are causing things to take longer to get to you.

The new team members want a couple of weeks to adapt to the working dev environments.

Improwised Technologies can help at any point in the process, whether you are starting with a clean slate or building a platform solution on top of an existing project.

How to Do It

How you develop an internal platform is almost as valuable as the technologies you use to build it. In the improwised perspective:

1. Start with little (depth over breadth)

Pick one or two very challenging goals, such as setting up CI/CD, deploying cloud environments, and then build self-service automation for them

2. Think of the Platform in a similar way to a product

Get people to communicate their ideas, keep track of how many people use it, and create a backlog for items that need to be fixed. Your customers are developers, so do anything you can to have them enjoy their time with you.

3.Use tools and standards that you know work

• Pick a mix of tools that are industry standard, such as:
• You can use Kubernetes for workload management.
• Terraform or Pulumi for Infrastructure as Code
• For CI/CD, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or ArgoCD

For visibility, you can use Prometheus, Grafana, Dynatrace, etc. Utilizing Sentinel or OPA to ensure that policy-as-code is being adhered to

Finishing this loop

Modern IT teams need a platform to work from, not if, but when it will happen.

At Improwised Tech, we partner with your tech leaders to build and execute internal platforms that can grow and adapt as your organization grows and adapts, by enabling developers to independently manage the development loop while we support on behalf of the organization.

Real-world platform engineering

Platform engineering is not just a concept; it is helping to transform how some of the most progressive companies deliver software today. Here are a couple of BIG examples of how people are using it:

Netflix

Netflix created an internal developer platform that abstracts the complexity of the underlying Kubernetes infrastructure. It is easy for developers to simply use templates to build microservices, and their IDP enables them to easily observe what is going on with independent deployments. This reduces release cycles and helps developers spend time coding.

Source: The Humanitec Blog Zalando

One of the major European fashion retailers established their own platform called Stups. Using Stups ensured that all their hundreds of microservices that had been built on their cloud infrastructure used the same provisioning, security, and deployment pipelines. The Stups platform team works solely to improve the development experience. From: PlatformEngineering.org

Spotify

Spotify’s Backstage platform is now the best open-source example of an internal developer site. Backstage gives engineers one consistent place to manage services, deployments, and documentation, all of which are interconnected through their IDP.

These success stories demonstrate that platform engineering can provide significant benefits. If you don’t have a lot of capital (and no, you don’t need to spend any of Netflix’s money), then improwised can help you customize and ultimately leverage these same principles to fit your size and tech stack.

What was the Future of Engineering Platforms

Platform engineering was a trend; you cannot just do platform engineering anymore. For engineering companies wanting to be successful, it is a must-have competency. As riga of company infrastructure becomes more decentralized and the need to conform to standards becomes more stringent, CTOs are striving to get their Engineering teams to build dedicated platform teams to simplify infrastructure, enforce standards, and enable innovation within their business.

Caveats are:

People will start adding to a narrative or story of “product as a platform.”

• There are AI-driven products that can implicitly test, create code, and debug issues.
• Developers will act in ways to make zero-trust security a common means of development.
• IDPs will provide immediate access to hybrid and multi-cloud.
• Internal platforms will change the technological culture and attractiveness of jobs.

Gartner suggests that by 2026, 80% of software engineering companies will employ platform teams to reduce throughput and provide the ability to be independent as an engineering team.

Why now? Why platform engineering? And why Improwised?

If you are a technology leader, and you have to deal with:

• Repeatable DevOps tasks that have to be undertaken for each new service.
• Starting new processes can be difficult, or there are too many tools to integrate.
• Security, compliance, or observability makes people anxious, and the teams are delayed from delivering.

Then you should invest in a plan for platform engineering.

improwised helps high-growth startups, scale-ups, and mid-sized businesses architect and construct Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) that perform in their environments.

• You get the benefit of automating Terraform, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines, either to put into production or to keep clean to reduce risk.
• You can build security, best practices, and observability into every deployment path.
• You will complete work faster, safer, and with more enjoyment if you treat your engineers as customers.

Do you want to elevate your engineering practices into the 21st century?

Let us turn your platform into your platform.

Reach out to Improwised Tech for a one-to-one platform engineering consultation.

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