Platform Engineering Guide: Internal Developer Platforms Explained
What is platform engineering? Learn how to build internal developer platforms, create golden paths, and improve developer experience with practical guidance.
Platform engineering is the hottest trend in DevOps. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 80% of software engineering organisations will establish platform teams. But what does it actually mean, and should you invest in it?
What is Platform Engineering?
Platform engineering is the discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organisations. In simpler terms: building the platform that developers use to build products.
A platform team creates golden paths, pre-approved, well-lit paths for common tasks, alongside self-service capabilities that let developers provision what they need without raising tickets. The platform builds in guardrails for security and compliance, and focuses on developer experience through tools that make developers more productive.
Platform Engineering vs DevOps
Platform engineering isn't a replacement for DevOps, it's an evolution. DevOps gave development teams responsibility for operations, but this created challenges: every team building their own tooling, increased cognitive load on developers, inconsistent practices across teams, and significant duplication of effort. Platform engineering addresses these issues by centralising the "how" while leaving the "what" to product teams.
DevOps = "you build it, you run it" + culture change. Platform engineering = making "you build it, you run it" easier and more consistent.
The Internal Developer Platform
At the heart of platform engineering is the Internal Developer Platform (IDP). An IDP typically includes:
Developer Portal
A developer portal provides a single pane of glass for developers to discover services and documentation, view service health and dependencies, access self-service actions, and find and reuse existing components. Popular options include Backstage (from Spotify), Port, and Cortex.
Infrastructure Automation
Self-service infrastructure provisioning lets developers work with pre-approved infrastructure templates that are policy-compliant by default and integrated with approval workflows. Common technologies include Terraform, Crossplane, and Pulumi.
CI/CD Platform
Standardised pipelines with security built in provide pipeline templates for common patterns, built-in security scanning, and deployment capabilities across multiple environments.
Observability
Centralised monitoring and logging offers automatic instrumentation, standardised dashboards, and alerting templates.
When Does Platform Engineering Make Sense?
Platform engineering isn't for everyone. It makes sense when you have scale (more than 5-10 development teams), repetition (teams doing similar things in different ways), cognitive overload (developers spending too much time on infrastructure), compliance requirements (need for consistent security and governance), or multi-cloud or complex infrastructure where abstraction provides value.
It probably doesn't make sense when you have fewer than five teams, your infrastructure is simple and stable, or you're in an early-stage startup focused on finding product-market fit.
Building a Platform Team
Skills Needed
A platform team typically needs infrastructure and cloud expertise, software engineering skills (you're building a product, after all), security knowledge, DevOps and SRE experience, and a product management mindset.
Treating Platform as a Product
The most important mindset shift is recognising that your platform is a product and developers are your customers. This means conducting user research with development teams, measuring developer satisfaction, prioritising features that reduce friction, and documenting and marketing your platform internally.
Platform Engineering in Azure
Azure provides strong building blocks for platform engineering. Azure DevOps and GitHub provide CI/CD platforms with template capabilities. Azure Policy offers guardrails and compliance enforcement. Azure Managed Grafana enables observability. Azure Deployment Environments provides self-service environments. And Azure Developer CLI (azd) improves the developer experience.
Getting Started
If you're considering platform engineering, start small. Begin by understanding your developers and their pain points. Identify quick wins, things you can standardise with minimal effort. Build one golden path starting with the most common use case, then iterate based on feedback, treating it as a product. Scale gradually rather than trying to boil the ocean.
The biggest platform engineering failure mode: building what you think developers need instead of what they actually need. Always validate with real users.
How We Can Help
We help organisations design and build internal developer platforms that actually get adopted:
- Platform strategy and roadmap
- Developer portal implementation (Backstage, custom)
- Golden path design
- CI/CD standardisation
- Self-service infrastructure
Get in touch to discuss your platform engineering journey.
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