What Is Platform Engineering? Role, Principles & Benefits

Platform engineering is the process of creating and maintaining toolchains that enhance software development and delivery. It involves tasks such as preparing CI/CD pipelines, setting up staging environments, and configuring Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to automate cloud resource provisioning. The goal is to provide developers with self-service access to infrastructure, enabling them to work more efficiently without relying on other teams like Operations and Infrastructure. Key principles of platform engineering include automation and IaC, focus on efficiency, self-service access, and continual evolution. Benefits of platform engineering include accelerated development, promotion of focus and specialization, and ensuring tools and processes continually develop. While it is not an alternative to DevOps, platform engineering can be seen as a practical implementation of DevOps concepts and philosophies.