Platform Engineering

Platform engineering has emerged as a response to the growing complexity of modern software delivery. As organizations adopt Kubernetes, microservices, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure as code, they are creating dedicated teams responsible for building and operating the internal platforms that power developer workflows.

This guide explains what platform engineering is, how it differs from DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE), and why platform teams require structured incident response when shared systems fail.

What is platform engineering? 

Platform engineering is the practice of building and operating an internal developer platform (IDP) that provides standardized, self-service tools for application teams.

Instead of every developer team managing its own CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes configurations, infrastructure code, and observability setup, the platform team creates reusable “golden paths” that developers can consume on demand without reinventing the wheel.

In practical terms, platform engineers build and maintain:

• Kubernetes clusters and deployment frameworks
• CI/CD pipeline templates
• Infrastructure as code modules
• Service catalogs and developer portals
• Observability and logging standards
• Security and compliance guardrails

Their customers are internal engineering/developer teams, not external users.

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