Platform engineering is about creating the internal systems and tools that support software development teams. Rather than building end-user applications, platform engineers focus on the infrastructure, workflows, and environments that make it easier and more efficient for developers to work. Their goal is to reduce complexity, improve consistency, and enable teams to deliver software reliably at scale.
Key Takeaways:
- Platform engineering creates the internal tools and systems that make it easier and faster for developers to build and deliver software.
- By automating and standardizing workflows, platform engineering brings DevOps principles to life for development teams.
- Benefits include quicker onboarding, less manual work, consistent deployments, and happier developers.
- Challenges include balancing flexibility, driving adoption, and measuring impact.
What is platform engineering?
Platform engineering is the discipline of designing and maintaining internal platforms that enable software developers to build and deliver applications faster and more reliably.
A platform engineer builds the tooling, workflows, and infrastructure that development teams rely on daily, reducing complexity and enabling self-service environments.
What does a platform engineer do?
Platform engineers act as internal service providers, building the platforms that product teams use to ship software.
Platform engineer responsibilities:
- Designing and maintaining Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs)
- Managing CI/CD workflows, infrastructure-as-code, and deployment tooling
- Standardizing environments for development, staging, and production
- Automating manual operations tasks to boost efficiency
- Ensuring platforms are observable, resilient, and scalable
In short, they don’t build the product; they build the system that builds the product.
Goals of a platform engineer
The goals of platform engineering revolve around enabling scalability, speed, and consistency across the software delivery lifecycle. Specifically, platform engineers aim to:
- Improve developer experience by reducing friction and cognitive load
- Accelerate software delivery through automated pipelines and reusable workflows
- Increase reliability by standardizing environments and infrastructure
- Promote security and compliance by embedding best practices into shared tooling
- Foster a culture of self-service to reduce operational bottlenecks
Platform engineering vs DevOps vs SRE
While these roles are closely related, they have distinct responsibilities:
|
Role |
Focus |
Responsibilities |
Primary Goal |
|
Platform engineering |
Developer enablement |
Build internal platforms, standardize tooling, manage infrastructure-as-code |
Improve developer productivity |
|
DevOps |
Culture and collaboration |
Break down silos, implement CI/CD, manage deployments |
Align dev and ops for faster delivery |
|
SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) |
Reliability |
Maintain SLAs, monitor systems, manage incidents, automate ops |
Ensure system availability and performance |
Platform engineering vs DevOps
DevOps is a cultural and organizational philosophy. Platform engineering makes DevOps actionable by building the tooling and systems that support it.
Where DevOps promotes collaboration, platform engineering creates the tech scaffolding to enable that collaboration.
Platform engineering vs SRE
SREs are focused on maintaining system reliability and uptime. Platform engineers focus on developer enablement and delivery pipelines. In many organizations, platform engineers and SREs work closely, but their KPIs differ: one prioritizes performance, the other productivity.
Benefits of platform engineering
Faster developer onboarding: Spin up dev environments in minutes, not days. This minimizes downtime for new hires and contract teams.
Example: PagerDuty’s Automation can help standardize environment provisioning.
Reduced toil through automation: Manual tasks (think: spinning up infrastructure or managing secrets) are automated and built into platforms.
With runbook automation, teams can scale operations without scaling headcount.
More consistent deployments: Shared templates and tools mean fewer surprises in staging vs production.
PagerDuty workflows support repeatable, observable processes across the SDLC.
Improved developer happiness: Self-service tools and consistent workflows reduce the need for constant support from ops. Developers spend more time building, less time waiting on tickets.
Challenges of platform engineering
Balancing abstraction and flexibility: Too much abstraction can slow innovation. Too little leads to chaos. Platform teams need to strike the right balance.
Organizational alignment: Platform engineering only works if product teams use the tools. This requires internal marketing, documentation, and trust-building.
Measuring success: Unlike features or revenue, success metrics like “developer productivity” or “reduced toil” can be harder to quantify. Use platform engineering metrics, such as mean time to deploy, onboarding time, or incidents per deployment, to measure impact.
Final thoughts
Platform engineering is shaping the future of software delivery. For engineering orgs looking to scale efficiently, reduce toil, and boost developer velocity, it’s no longer a nice-to-have—it’s a strategic function.
To learn how PagerDuty can support your platform engineering team with automation, observability, and incident response, visit our AI Hub.