What Is Platform Engineering?

Overview

Platform engineering is a software development approach that combines DevOps principles to elevate the developer experience. It focuses on designing and constructing toolchains and workflows that promote self-service capabilities for software engineering teams. By addressing security, compliance, and operational efficiency, platform engineering enables organizations to build robust internal systems tailored to the needs of both developers and operations teams.

According to Gartner, by 2026, 80% of large software engineering organizations are expected to establish platform engineering teams. These teams will focus on reusable services and tools to streamline application delivery and improve collaboration between developers and operations. This shift underscores the growing importance of reducing cognitive load and enhancing the developer experience through platform engineering initiatives.

Core Principles and Practices

At its heart, platform engineering focuses on boosting productivity and efficiency through key principles such as:

• Developer-Centric Design: Platforms are built with developer needs at the forefront, incorporating feedback to ensure user-friendly interfaces and functionalities.
• Scalability: As organizations grow, platform solutions scale accordingly, facilitating seamless operations across various environments.
• Automation: Routine tasks are automated to increase speed, reduce manual workload, and minimize human error.
• Compliance and Governance: Adhering to stringent security and compliance standards ensures that all operations align with industry regulations.

In practice, platform engineering looks to create an environment for efficient, secure software development and deployment. This approach emphasizes continuous collaboration between teams to drive innovation without compromising on security or compliance.

Best Practices in Platform Engineering

Implementing best practices in platform engineering is essential for creating efficient, scalable, and developer-friendly platforms. These practices foster consistency, enhance developer autonomy, and integrate security and observability, ensuring streamlined workflows that align with organizational goals.

Here are some best practices:

• Standardized Environments: Maintaining consistency across development, testing, and production environments minimizes configuration drift, reduces errors, and supports smoother deployments.
• Developer Autonomy: Self-service capabilities empower developers to deploy, test, and manage applications independently, reducing bottlenecks and avoiding delays.
• Scalability and Flexibility: Platforms must scale with organizational growth while maintaining efficiency and performance.
• Security and Compliance Integration: Security should be embedded into the platform engineering process from the start. Automating compliance checks and adopting a security-first mindset reduces risks and ensures alignment with industry standards.
• Observability and Monitoring: A proactive approach to monitoring and observability provides real-time insights into platform health and performance. This practice helps teams identify and resolve issues quickly, supporting both reliability and uptime.
• Continuous Improvement and Collaboration: Platform engineering thrives on feedback and collaboration across teams. Regularly iterating and refining the platform based on developer feedback and new requirements ensures the platform remains relevant and valuable.

Adopting these practices helps organizations build a robust platform that supports developer needs, ensures security, and scales effectively with growth.

Key Benefits and Challenges

Platform engineering revolutionizes the software development lifecycle, boosting productivity through self-service environments that empower developers, enhance innovation, and reduce time-to-market.

Key Benefits

• Increased Developer Productivity: By enabling self-service capabilities, platform engineering allows developers to manage deployments independently, reducing bottlenecks and speeding up delivery timelines.
• Reducing Cognitive Load: By simplifying and automating complex infrastructure tasks, platform engineering reduces cognitive strain on developers, enabling them to focus on delivering high-quality code without being bogged down by operational concerns.
• Standardization and Consistency: Standardized environments across development stages reduce errors, streamline transitions, and simplify troubleshooting, resulting in a smoother, more reliable workflow.
• Enhanced Developer Experience: Abstracting infrastructure complexities allows developers to focus on core tasks, fostering creativity and innovation while minimizing repetitive work.
• Scalability and Adaptability: Designed with scalability in mind, platform engineering supports infrastructure growth, enabling quick scaling and seamless tool integration.

Key Challenges

• Integration Complexity: Managing multiple tools and configurations can complicate integration, slowing down workflows.
• Delays Impacting Development: Delays caused by developers waiting on platform engineering teams to address requests or implement changes can create bottlenecks, slowing overall productivity.
• Security and Compliance Maintenance: Ensuring consistent security and compliance across environments are challenging, especially with rapid deployments.
• Resource Scalability and Management: Scaling applications efficiently and managing resources across environments can strain teams without proper support.
• Continuous Improvement and Collaboration: Keeping up with feedback-driven updates and evolving organizational needs requires constant effort, which can be difficult to sustain.

Platform engineering’s benefits are transformative, but overcoming these challenges is essential to fully harness its potential, fostering a development environment that’s productive, secure, and scalable.

The Rise of Internal Developer Platforms

In today’s fast-evolving tech landscape, Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) are essential for platform engineers looking to create efficient, developer-centric environments.

Internal Developer Platforms

IDPs act as a flexible abstraction layer bridging developers and the technologies that power modern software solutions. By providing standardized, scalable, and secure self-service tools, IDPs empower developers to focus on coding without navigating operational complexities.

• Empowering Developer Self-Service: IDPs offer on-demand access to resources, enabling developers to deploy, test, and manage applications independently, reducing dependence on IT operations teams.
• Enhancing Developer Experience: IDPs streamline workflows, promoting efficiency and reducing the disruption caused by frequent context-switching.
• Standardization, Scalability, and Security: IDPs allow platform engineers to build scalable, secure, and consistent environments. By providing standardized tools, they enable seamless platform growth, maintain high-security standards, and reduce developers’ cognitive load, fostering greater innovation.

This evolution highlights the necessity for organizations to adopt platform engineering tools that align with strategic goals, enhancing developer autonomy and innovation. By adopting IDPs, platform engineers create a sustainable, high-performance development ecosystem that meets the demands of modern software engineering.

Choreo: An Internal Developer Platform

Choreo is an advanced IDP, aligning seamlessly with platform engineering principles to boost productivity, scalability, and security in software development.

How Choreo Addresses Platform Engineering Challenges

• Simplifying Integration: Choreo unifies tools and configurations in a single platform, streamlining workflows and minimizing the complexity of managing disparate tools. This allows teams to focus on development instead of integration issues.
• Ensuring Security and Compliance: With built-in security and automated compliance checks across all stages, Choreo enables fast, secure deployments without compromising regulatory standards.
• Efficient Resource Scaling: Choreo’s automated scaling and resource management optimize application performance, ensuring smooth scaling without straining teams or increasing costs.
• Fully Managed Platform: Choreo’s fully managed environment frees platform engineers from maintenance, updates, and scaling, allowing them to focus on optimizing developer workflows. With Choreo ensuring infrastructure reliability, security, and performance, teams can prioritize innovation and strategic projects without worrying about platform upkeep.

By addressing these challenges, Choreo supports efficient, secure, and flexible platform engineering, empowering teams to focus on core innovation.

Future Trends in Platform Engineering

Platform engineering continues to evolve rapidly, driven by advancements in automation, AI, and the growing need for developer autonomy. Here are some key trends shaping the future of platform engineering:

• AI-Driven Automation: AI and ML will enhance platform automation by predicting performance needs, resolving issues proactively, and optimizing resource use.
• Expanded Self-Service Tools: Platforms will increasingly empower developers with self-service options, enabling faster deployments and reduced reliance on operations.
• Integrated Security and Compliance: Automated security checks and compliance features will become standard, ensuring platforms stay secure and meet regulatory demands without extra effort.
• Growth of IDPs: IDPs will unify access to tools and infrastructure, streamlining workflows and improving team collaboration.

These trends point toward a future of more autonomous, scalable, and adaptable platform engineering practices.

Ready to take your platform engineering to the next level? Sign up to Choreo and experience a fully managed platform built to streamline your workflows, boost developer autonomy, and scale with ease. From security to observability, Choreo has all you need to create a powerful, efficient, and future-ready platform.