Introduction to Platform Engineering

Explore why DevOps fell short and how platform engineering creates a developer self-service platform to simplify complex toolchains, enabling you to build it, you run it at scale.

Platform engineering binds diverse tools into golden paths, enabling developer self-service and reducing cognitive load, and delivers an internal developer platform as a product with security by design.

Explore the structure of an internal developer platform. See how it operates across GCP and AWS with front end, back end, and five planes.

Adopt a product mindset to differentiate platform engineers from DevOps and drive internal developer platforms. Build golden paths for self-serve infrastructure, automate tasks, and enforce governance and security by design.

Treat platform as a product to drive platform engineering, framing internal developers as customers and launching a minimum viable product to iterate through product lifecycle with a tight feedback loop.

Apply ten proven product-management best practices to platform engineering, leveraging open-source and commercial tooling, focusing on back-end first, adoption from day one, measurement, security by design, and golden paths.

Explore the value of platform engineering, building an internal developer platform and platform team, using a pyramid view of developers and operations pain points and time-to-market benefits from automation.

Platform engineering enables developer self-service, reduces waiting times and cognitive load, eliminates shadow operations, and boosts productivity and velocity while ensuring security and compliance through guardrails and the golden path.

Platform engineering standardizes infrastructure and automates workflows across development teams. It eliminates ticket toil and bottlenecks by enforcing default templates through a common layer that equalizes consumption and strengthens security.

Drive faster time to market by automating provisioning and standardizing governance, security, and compliance, empowering developers with self-service while reducing costs and boosting retention.

Explore the essential tool belt for platform engineers, from containers and Kubernetes to IaC, CI/CD, and GitOps, plus workloads, orchestrators, portals, and security.

Discover how to assemble tools into a coherent platform engineering solution using reference architectures, and explore the five planes—developer control, integration and delivery, resource, monitoring and security—driving orchestration.

Follow the three-layer platform engineering stack: application choreography, platform orchestration, and infrastructure as code, starting from the back end, then add a front-end portal as an interface.

Explore the roles of infrastructure platform engineers and DevOps platform engineers, and learn how to design enterprise grade internal developer platforms with strong stakeholder interfaces and feedback loops.

Lead efforts to improve developer experience by enabling self-service and streamlined workflows, collaborating with application and infrastructure teams to optimize portal interfaces and APIs and automate pain points.

Infrastructure platform engineers standardize how developers provision and consume infrastructure, collaborating with security, architects, and ops to enable golden paths on developer platform via infrastructure as code and platform orchestration.

Assess the current status of platform engineering, its impact on developer productivity and self-service, and the thriving community around platform engineering.org, platform con, and weekly meetups.

Gartner's hype cycles show platform engineering rising, with infrastructure platform engineering as a key subset, and by 2026 80% plus of large enterprises will adopt it.

Discover how platform engineering reframes infrastructure as a product, delivering an internal developer platform with control planes and tooling to improve usability at scale.