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glossary

Platform Engineering

The discipline of building internal platforms — golden paths, self-service tooling, and paved infrastructure — that let product teams ship software without each team reinventing CI/CD, Kubernetes, and observability themselves.

In depth

Platform engineering treats internal infrastructure as a product whose customers are the company's own developers. Instead of every product team wiring up its own pipelines, clusters, and monitoring, a platform team builds a curated, self-service layer, often called an Internal Developer Platform, that offers golden paths: opinionated, well-supported routes for common needs like 'create a new microservice' or 'get a database.' Developers consume these through portals such as Backstage, CLIs, or simple configuration files, while the platform handles the underlying Kubernetes, IaC, security guardrails, and observability wiring. The crucial mindset shift is product thinking: platform teams do user research, maintain roadmaps, measure adoption, and treat developers as customers who can opt in, rather than forcing standards by decree. Done well, platform engineering reduces cognitive load on product teams, enforces security and cost controls invisibly, and scales DevOps practices across hundreds of teams without hundreds of bespoke solutions.

Why it matters

As organizations scale, 'every team does its own DevOps' collapses into duplicated effort and inconsistent security. Platform engineering recovers economies of scale while preserving developer autonomy, and Gartner and industry surveys consistently rank it among the fastest-growing infrastructure disciplines.

Real-world example

example.txt

A company with 60 product teams builds a platform where developers run one command to scaffold a new service, complete with repository, CI/CD pipeline, Kubernetes deployment, dashboards, and on-call wiring. Time to first production deploy for a new service drops from three weeks to one afternoon, and security patches roll out platform-wide instead of team by team.

Tools related to Platform Engineering

BackstageKubernetesArgo CDTerraformCrossplanePort

Interview questions

  1. What is platform engineering and how does it relate to DevOps and SRE?
  2. What is a golden path, and how do you keep it from becoming a golden cage?
  3. How would you measure whether an internal platform is successful?
  4. Why is product thinking important for platform teams?
  5. How do you drive platform adoption without mandating it?
  6. Describe how you would design self-service environment provisioning.