Development teams put demands on infrastructure that require diverse platforms, cloud resources, services, constantly changing continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, and a wide range of access needs. Platform engineering can tame complex software development efforts for DevOps, NetOps, and managed services through internal developer platforms (IDPs). IDPs act as the bridge between the components of software delivery and an organization’s development needs by enforcing identity and role-based access controls, provisioning APIs and cloud resources, managing CI/CD pipelines for deployments and visibility into build statuses, and connecting to observability platforms for real-time monitoring and insights. This article focuses on how platform engineering can streamline the deployment and management of infrastructure for development teams by implementing internal development platforms.
What is platform engineering?
Platform engineering is a discipline that designs, builds, and maintains infrastructure and tools to improve developer productivity and efficiency. As development efforts become more complex, so does the need for centralized teams to build, deploy, and manage software and application environments. Platform engineering focuses on enhancing developer productivity and operational efficiency. Platform engineers focus on deploying IDPs that provide development teams with self-service tools and resource management. IDPs consist of tools, components, and pipelines to provision and manage role-based access to cloud resources, services, and tools while ensuring security and compliance and reducing risk due to unmanaged access. IDPs enable developers to focus on coding by streamlining onboarding, standardizing workflows, managing CI/CD pipelines, connecting with observability platforms for real-time monitoring and insights, and expediting software delivery.
What are the benefits of platform engineering?
Organizations of all sizes are turning to platform engineering to manage development, improve workflows, enforce best practices, reduce security risks, and streamline software delivery. The benefits of adopting platform engineering include:
Improved developer experience: Self-service tools and automation reduce onboarding time and centralize the development environment and tools, allowing developers to focus on coding.
Standardized development practices: A consistent development environment ensures uniformity in workflows, security, and compliance.
Faster delivery: A controlled environment streamlines connectivity to CI/CD pipelines and automated processes, which can help accelerate software delivery.
Enhanced reliability and security: Platform engineering efforts enforce best practices in system architecture and access controls, providing effective security and reporting for maintaining compliance.
Operational efficiency: Centralized infrastructure management can help reduce redundant work and improve scalability.
What do platform engineers do?
Platform engineers, who may be a part of an organization’s DevEx or core engineering teams, are responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining foundational infrastructure and tools for development teams. The goal is to improve the developer experience and development velocity by reducing friction, improving efficiency, and accelerating software delivery. Platform engineer responsibilities and benefits include:
Building and maintaining infrastructure as code (IaC): Automating the provisioning and management of infrastructure resources via scripts and pipelines
Developing and optimizing CI/CD pipelines: Ensuring seamless build, test, and deployment processes for development teams
Implementing observability and monitoring solutions: Providing real-time visibility and reporting into system performance and reliability
Managing role-based access control (RBAC): Enforcing security policies and managing access roles and permissions
Creating self-service developer portals: Centralizing access to development resources for faster onboarding and cohesive software development
Ensuring platform scalability and reliability: Continuously improving platform efficiency to support growing teams and workloads
Collaborating with development and site reliability engineering (SRE) teams: Aligning platform capabilities with the needs of engineers to improve productivity and service reliability
What are the challenges for platforming engineers?
While platform engineering offers significant advantages, it also presents several challenges for platform engineers themselves:
Balancing Standardization with Flexibility: Engineers must create standardized workflows while allowing teams the flexibility to innovate and work efficiently within different environments.
Managing Tool Sprawl: With the rapid growth of DevOps and cloud-native technologies, platform engineers must navigate and integrate an ever-expanding set of tools while avoiding redundancy and complexity.
Ensuring Developer Adoption: Building a self-service platform is only effective if developers use it. Encouraging adoption often requires internal advocacy, documentation, and ongoing support.
Scaling Infrastructure Efficiently: As organizations grow, platform engineers need to ensure that infrastructure and tooling scale smoothly without introducing bottlenecks or degrading performance.
Addressing Security and Compliance Concerns: Platform engineers must embed security best practices into development workflows while maintaining ease of use and developer autonomy.
How platform engineering improves developer productivity
Platform engineering significantly enhances developer productivity by addressing key pain points in modern software development workflows:
Simplified infrastructure management: Platform engineering abstracts the complexity of infrastructure, enabling developers to focus on writing code rather than managing underlying systems. This reduces cognitive load and helps eliminate bottlenecks, enabling faster and more efficient development.
Standardized tools and processes: By providing a unified, self-service platform, platform engineering ensures consistency across development environments. This standardization minimizes errors and helps ensure that all teams follow best practices, leading to smoother workflows.
Automation of repetitive tasks: Platform engineering integrates automation into CI/CD pipelines, testing, and deployment processes, which helps reduce errors associated with manual effort, speeds up development cycles, and allows developers to concentrate on higher-value tasks.
Integrated security and compliance: Platform engineering embeds security and compliance into the development process, ensuring that applications meet industry standards without requiring additional effort from developers. It also helps reduce vulnerabilities and accelerate deployment timelines.
Platform engineering enables development teams to build secure, scalable, and efficient systems by centralizing infrastructure and delivering automation through self-service tools. As software complexity increases, organizations that embrace platform engineering are better equipped to accelerate innovation, streamline delivery, and minimize operational overhead.
Learn more
Learn more about Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs), which combine a curated set of tools, implementations, services, and infrastructure that streamline critical functionality and automation for platform engineering teams.
Review the concepts of platform engineering and golden paths for workflow automation discussed on Datadog’s blog: “Create Golden Paths for your development teams with Datadog App Builder and Workflow Automation.”
