What is platform engineering, and why is it important in today's tech landscape?

The Day My Infrastructure Caught Fire (Metaphorically)

I still remember the Monday morning when our entire deployment pipeline ground to a halt. There I was, flat white in hand, expecting a routine start to the week when Slack exploded with alerts. Three different teams were trying to deploy critical features, but our cobbled-together collection of CI/CD scripts, cloud resources, and custom tools had finally collapsed under its own weight.

Eight hours, countless terminal sessions, and several emergency meetings later, we'd patched things up. But the incident made one thing painfully clear: our technical estate had grown beyond what ad-hoc infrastructure management could handle. We needed a proper platform engineering approach.

Building Bridges, Not Just Roads

Think of traditional infrastructure as a network of roads. Developers need to get from point A (code) to point B (production), and they need infrastructure to get there. In the early days of cloud, we simply built these roads and handed developers the keys.

Platform engineering, however, is about building bridges, not just roads. A good bridge doesn't just connect two points—it standardises how you cross, provides guardrails to prevent accidents, and requires minimal understanding of structural engineering from the people using it daily.

Imagine you're visiting a new city. You could pore over maps, learn local driving regulations, and figure out complex parking systems yourself. Or, you could use public transport that handles all this complexity for you. Platform engineering builds this "public transport system" for your technology—developers simply step aboard and reach their destination without needing to become transport experts.

In the world of cloud infrastructure, this means creating self-service platforms that abstract away complexity while implementing best practices automatically. Instead of developers needing to understand Kubernetes manifests, network security, and cloud cost optimisation, they interact with developer portals, templates, and APIs that handle these concerns behind the scenes.

1. Platform Engineering Solves the "You Build It, You Run It" Paradox

Whilst DevOps culture championed the "you build it, you run it" mindset, in reality, this created a new problem: developers were drowning in operational complexity. Platform engineering acknowledges that specialization matters. By creating internal developer platforms, we're not abandoning DevOps principles—we're making them sustainable by providing the right abstractions.

2. Self-Service is the New Standard

The core principle of modern platform engineering is self-service. Successful platforms allow developers to provision resources, deploy applications, and troubleshoot issues without filing tickets or waiting for another team's assistance. This doesn't happen by accident—it requires thoughtful design of developer portals, templates, and tools that meet teams where they are.

3. Golden Paths, Not Golden Handcuffs

Effective platform engineering creates "golden paths"—optimised, well-supported ways of working that make following best practices easier than not following them. The key distinction: these are paths, not prisons. Teams should be encouraged, not forced, to use your platform. If teams are circumventing your platform, that's valuable feedback about its limitations.

4. Platform as a Product

The most successful platform teams treat their platform as a product with internal developers as customers. This means:

• Understanding user needs before building features

• Documenting thoroughly and accessibly

• Measuring adoption and satisfaction

• Iterating based on feedback

5. Cost and Security Benefits Are Real

Well-engineered platforms dramatically improve security posture and cost efficiency. By standardising infrastructure, embedding compliance as code, and implementing guardrails, we reduce risk. By optimising resource utilisation and implementing cost-aware defaults, we reduce waste.

Conclusion

Platform engineering isn't simply the latest tech buzzword—it's a necessary evolution in how we manage the growing complexity of modern technology stacks. As organisations continue to scale their digital capabilities, the gap between what developers need to accomplish and the complexity they should have to manage will only widen.

The companies that thrive will be those that invest in platform engineering as a core capability, creating interfaces that allow product teams to move quickly while maintaining governance, security, and efficiency. In my experience, there's no going back once you've experienced well-designed internal platforms—they transform the developer experience from frustration to flow, and in doing so, accelerate the entire organisation's ability to deliver value.

Whether you're just starting your platform engineering journey or evolving existing capabilities, remember that great platforms are invisible. They just work. And in today's complex tech landscape, that's perhaps the greatest achievement of all.