Platform Engineering
The concept of platform engineering reframes digital architecture as a self-service, automated platform that makes technology readily accessible and consumable.
Digital platforms define the architectural guidelines for an organization, centralize support efforts, and establish performance metrics. As such, they become the core foundation where development teams converge, business solutions are built, and the technology value is evaluated in alignment with organizational goals.
The benefits are clear. First, they accelerate time to market—a critical factor in today’s volatile, fast-changing environment where responsiveness can be a competitive advantage. These platforms accelerate technology adoption by enabling the rapid development of POCs, MVPs, and more—always with a clear focus on bringing use cases into production efficiently. They also support the seamless scaling of emerging technologies across the organization by making them available to all developers.
Additionally, platform engineering lowers the learning curve and accelerates technology adoption. It improves the developer experience—a critical advantage in an era marked by high turnover and a lack of specialized talent.
Another key aspect is the integration of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices, including observability, telemetry, AIOps, chaos engineering, and self-healing capabilities. Platform engineering teams govern the proper use of technologies in production. These practices ensure that solutions are secure, scalable, reliable, resilient, and cost-effective.
Step-by-Step Adoption of Digital Platforms
The first step is identifying application domains (such as customer-facing channels) that can benefit from this approach, especially those with high development volumes or continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) needs. Budget ownership can be a point of friction—CIOs and CTOs must see platform engineering as a core IT investment rather than a cost justified by other departments, if they want to proactively meet evolving business demands.
Start small. Initiatives like automating DevOps or launching a provisioning portal for temporary environments can deliver immediate value. Early wins can pave the way for more advanced concepts, such as curated catalogs of pre-packaged building blocks (PBCs) managed through an Internal Developer Portal (IDP), or enabling composability to streamline and accelerate solution assembly.
Friction is expected—between engineering, architecture, infrastructure, and DevOps—regarding ownership of the platform engineering product. The product owner must embrace new paradigms and challenge the status quo. Platform engineering drives a ZeroOps approach throughout the software development lifecycle, which requires organizational changes that may encounter resistance. However, adopting this approach requires significant cultural and organizational changes.
At its core, platform engineering is about removing technical obstacles for developers—so they can focus on building solutions that deliver real business value.