What is Platform Engineering?

In 2025, 83% of organizations have already started their platform engineering journey. But what exactly is platform engineering, and why has it become the fastest-growing discipline in DevOps?

The Evolution from DevOps

DevOps promised to break down silos between development and operations. But as organizations scaled, a new challenge emerged: cognitive overload. Developers were expected to master Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, security scanning, monitoring, and dozens of other tools—all while shipping features.

Traditional DevOps Model:
┌─────────────┐    ┌─────────────┐    ┌─────────────┐
│  Developer  │────│   DevOps    │────│  Operations │
│  (writes    │    │  (bridges   │    │  (manages   │
│   code)     │    │   both)     │    │   infra)    │
└─────────────┘    └─────────────┘    └─────────────┘
        ↓                 ↓                  ↓
   "I need to learn      "I'm            "Tickets
    everything"        stretched        everywhere"
                        thin"

Platform engineering solves this by creating a dedicated team that builds internal tools and workflows for developers.

Definition

Platform Engineering is the discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable developer self-service capabilities in the cloud-native era.

The key insight: instead of every team figuring out infrastructure individually, a platform team builds reusable, self-service capabilities that all teams can leverage.

Platform Teams vs DevOps Teams

Aspect	DevOps Team	Platform Team
Focus	CI/CD, automation, on-call	Developer experience, self-service
Customer	All teams equally	Developers as primary users
Product	Pipelines, scripts	Internal Developer Platform
Success Metric	Deployment frequency	Developer productivity, time-to-value
Mindset	Support/enablement	Product ownership

The Platform Engineering Stack

A modern platform engineering stack typically includes:

# Platform Engineering Stack
developer_portal:
  tool: Backstage
  purpose: "Service catalog, templates, documentation"

infrastructure_provisioning:
  tool: Crossplane
  purpose: "Self-service cloud resources"

gitops:
  tool: ArgoCD
  purpose: "Declarative deployments"

observability:
  tools:
    - Prometheus
    - Grafana
  purpose: "Platform health monitoring"

security:
  tools:
    - OPA Gatekeeper
    - Kyverno
  purpose: "Policy enforcement"

Why Platform Engineering Matters

The numbers speak for themselves:

Metric	Before Platform	After Platform
Developer onboarding	2-4 weeks	2-4 days
Time to first deployment	3-5 days	< 1 hour
Infrastructure requests	Ticket-based (days)	Self-service (minutes)
Cognitive load	High (learn everything)	Low (golden paths)

Gartner predicts that by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will have established platform teams.

The Platform Engineering Ratio

A general guideline: 1 platform engineer per 20-50 application developers, depending on platform maturity and complexity.

Small Org (50 devs):    1-2 platform engineers
Medium Org (200 devs):  4-10 platform engineers
Large Org (1000 devs):  20-50 platform engineers

In the next lesson, we'll explore the platform-as-product mindset that successful platform teams adopt. :::