Without the right frameworks in place, software development often feels like managing a project with too many moving parts and no cohesive plan. A good solution to this problem would be having a unified platform that streamlines processes, integrates tools, and provides consistency across the development lifecycle.

That’s what platform engineering offers—it simplifies the complexities of software development by making it easier to build, deploy, and maintain digital infrastructure. But what exactly is platform engineering, and why should your business care?

Well, if your business juggles multiple software tools, cloud environments, and constantly evolving tech needs, understanding platform engineering could be the key to unlocking smoother, more efficient operations. Let’s take a closer look at how this concept is reshaping tech ecosystems and how it can drive your IT strategy forward.

What is Platform Engineering?

Platform engineering is the practice of designing, developing, and maintaining the underlying technical infrastructure needed to build robust software applications. Platform engineers focus on creating reusable frameworks, tools, and automation that allow development teams to focus on coding features rather than infrastructure setup and maintenance.

Some key aspects of platform engineering include:

  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Automating the setup and management of IT infrastructure using code, which enhances repeatability and minimizes errors.
  • Tooling and Automation: Developing custom tools or configuring existing tools to streamline processes and reduce manual tasks.
  • Orchestration: Managing containerized application deployment and operation through tools like Kubernetes.
  • DevOps Integration: Close collaboration with developers to align culture and processes, promoting shared accountability.
  • Scalability: Ensuring infrastructure can easily expand to meet traffic increases through practices like auto-scaling.
  • Monitoring: Implementing observability solutions to track infrastructure health, dependencies, and application performance.

By handling underlying complexities, platform engineering facilitates rapid, reliable software delivery across dynamic environments.

Platform Engineering vs. DevOps

To better understand what platform engineering is, it’s helpful to compare it to the closely related concept of DevOps:

  • Platform Engineering: Focuses on building and operating the development platform itself, providing tools and infrastructure for developers to build and deploy applications efficiently. It aims to create a standardized, self-service framework that enables developers to work without worrying about low-level complexity.
  • DevOps: A set of cultural/operational practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to shorten the development lifecycle and provide continuous integration (CI), delivery, and deployment of high-quality software. It’s a cultural and operational philosophy that emphasizes collaboration and automation for a smooth flow from development to production.

While both approaches aim to improve software development and delivery, platform engineering is an evolution of DevOps principles, with a more specific focus on creating a scalable, standardized platform for dev teams.

Platform Engineering vs. Site Reliability Engineering

What is platform engineering’s main distinction from Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), as these disciplines tend to exhibit some overlap, too? Here’s what sets them apart:

  • Platform Engineering: As we’ve established, it focuses on building and maintaining the internal infrastructure upon which developers can create, test, and deploy applications efficiently.
  • Site Reliability Engineering: Aims to ensure the reliability and availability of applications in production by applying software engineering principles to operational problems. Site Reliability Engineering involves a heavy emphasis on monitoring, incident response, and automation to keep systems running smoothly.

So, while both disciplines contribute to overall system health and performance, platform engineering lays the groundwork that enables SRE practices to be more effective.

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

PaaS solutions provide integrated tooling and services for building and deploying applications without worrying about infrastructure, servers, software updates, or databases. It provides cloud hosting environments and services such as runtime libraries and HTTP servers for building and delivering applications. Examples include Heroku, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and Google App Engine.

Platform engineers may work within a PaaS or construct their own reusable platforms. Either way, their goal is to abstract away the infrastructural needs of app development so that the software developer only has to focus on SaaS development or whatever application they might be building.

How Do Platform Engineering Services Work?

Platform engineering revolves around breaking complex systems into modular, reusable elements, creating an ecosystem that supports the entire software development lifecycle.

Platform engineers use IaC tools like Terraform to automate the provisioning and management of computing resources, ensuring consistency and scalability.

Next, automation powers the core workflows. Robust CI/CD pipelines automate testing, building, and deployment processes, enabling faster and safer software releases. Platforms are deployed, configured, patched, backed up, and monitored programmatically using scripts (e.g., Python, Bash, and PowerShell). This promotes consistency while reducing human errors and overhead.

Platform engineers often use technologies like Docker and Kubernetes to package applications and manage their deployment across various environments.

Observability and monitoring solutions provide end-to-end visibility. Metrics, traces, and logs offer deep insights into dependencies, bottlenecks, and user experiences. Automated alerts flag anomalies for rapid troubleshooting. Over time, data gathered fuels continuous improvement for more reliable releases.

The result is an engineering platform that empowers application teams to focus solely on business functionality and rapid experimentation, accelerating time to market for software solutions. In short, platform engineers handle operational “plumbing” so software engineers can focus on creating reliable, scalable, high-performance applications.

Benefits of Platform Engineering

Implementing platform engineering solutions can bring numerous advantages to organizations. Let’s explore some of the key benefits:

Increase Security

Platform engineering enhances security by implementing standardized security measures across the entire development and deployment pipeline. It helps enforce universal identity and access management, compliance controls, encryption standards, and response playbooks to strengthen security postures. All applications and services adhere to the organization’s security policies, reducing the risk of vulnerabilities and data breaches.

Maintain Consistency

One of the primary benefits of platform engineering is maintaining consistency across development environments. A standardized platform ensures that all teams are working with the same tools, libraries, and configurations. Such consistency reduces errors, promotes reusability, improves collaboration, and accelerates the onboarding of new team members.

Decrease Complexity

Platform engineering abstracts away complex infrastructure details, allowing developers to focus on writing code rather than managing infrastructure. Reducing complexity not only reduces the cognitive load on development teams but also leads to faster time to market for new features and applications./p>

Monitor Performance Metrics

With a well-designed digital platform engineering solution, organizations can easily monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) across their entire technology stack. Teams can therefore quickly identify and address performance bottlenecks, optimize resource utilization, and make data-driven decisions to improve overall system efficiency.

Efficient Software Development

Platform engineering significantly boosts software development efficiency by providing developers with a consistent, well-maintained platform. Teams can leverage pre-built components, automated workflows, and self-service capabilities to accelerate their development cycles. A 2024 Puppet State of DevOps Report shows that 50% of respondents using platform engineering experienced increased productivity, and 40% reported better software quality.

What Does a Platform Engineer Do?

A platform engineer is responsible for designing, building, and maintaining the technical infrastructure that supports an organization’s software development and deployment processes. Platform engineers bridge the gap between software development and operations, often working closely with dev teams to streamline workflows and improve productivity.

This role requires a unique blend of skills but a platform engineer typically requires proficiency in areas like DevOps practices, cloud technologies, containerization, automation tools, and programming languages like Python.

A bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, IT, or a related field is commonly desired. Hands-on experience with infrastructure code, distributed systems administration, monitoring, and release engineering is also beneficial.

Platform Engineer Responsibilities

As we’ve mentioned, a platform engineer’s duties can be diverse, but they typically include:

  • Build Software Components: Design, implement, and manage the underlying infrastructure, such as Software Development Kits (SDKs) and APIs that diverse teams can easily leverage.
  • Maintain Applications: Configure and manage scalable infrastructure on cloud platforms or enterprise data centers using automation and orchestration tools.
  • Implement Deployment Pipelines: Platform engineers automate testing, integration, and release workflows to streamline software releases.
  • Prepare Reports: Generate reports on platform performance, usage, and areas for improvement.
  • Track Metrics: Use monitoring tools to analyze metrics, identify bottlenecks, and refine infrastructure for optimal application performance.
  • Prepare Documentation: Create in-depth technical documentation and knowledge-sharing aids that other teams can leverage in learning the platform.
  • Support Development Teams: Platform engineers collaborate closely with developers, addressing technical questions and ensuring their environments meet needs.

For further guidance on becoming a platform engineer and more details about the role, consider exploring these resources:

Platform Engineering Examples & Case Studies

Many companies rely on platform engineering for competitive advantages. Let’s look at some real-world examples:

  • SLTN: This Dutch-managed service provider partnered with eG Innovations to enhance IT performance monitoring for its clients across multiple environments, including data centers, public clouds, and SaaS applications. By using eG Enterprise, SLTN gained comprehensive visibility into its entire IT infrastructure, enabling faster issue resolution and proactive performance management. This solution helped SLTN maintain high service levels and respond to client needs more efficiently.
  • Zymr: Specializing in platform engineering services, this company has worked with retail and eCommerce companies to develop and modernize their platforms and ecosystems. Their case studies showcase how platform engineering can be applied to improve customer experiences and streamline operations in the retail sector.
  • Improving: This consultancy firm has assisted companies across various sectors with their platform engineering needs. As these case studies demonstrate, their approach to platform engineering has enabled numerous businesses to achieve operational efficiency and enhance system reliability and performance.

Powerful Platform Engineering Tools

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Platform engineers utilize a wide range of tools to build and maintain efficient development environments. Here’s a list of popular tools commonly used in platform engineering:

  • Containerization Tools: Tools like Docker and Podman allow developers to package applications and their dependencies into containers, ensuring consistency across different environments.
  • Container Orchestration: Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, and OpenShift are essential for managing containerized applications and automating deployment, scaling, and operations.
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Chef, and Puppet enable the management of infrastructure through code, allowing for version control and automated provisioning.
  • Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): Platforms like Jenkins, GitLab CI, and CircleCI automate the testing and deployment of software, ensuring rapid and reliable delivery of updates.
  • Cloud Services: Major providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud offer extensive cloud computing resources that support scalable and flexible application deployment.
  • Monitoring and Logging: Enterprise-level monitoring solutions such as eG Enterprise provide deep insights into application performance and system health, offering comprehensive solutions that reduce the complexity of managing multiple systems.
  • Collaboration and Communication Platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams facilitate communication among team members, enhancing collaboration across development and operations.
  • Version Control: Systems like Git, GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket are critical for managing changes to source code, enabling collaborative development practices.

All these tools are integral to the platform engineering process, allowing teams to automate workflows, manage infrastructure efficiently, and ensure that applications are delivered reliably and at scale.

Schedule Your Free Trial with eG Innovations

By now, it should be clear that platform engineering isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a critical component of any forward-thinking IT strategy. Whether it’s increasing security, maintaining consistency, or simplifying complex systems, platform engineering offers a robust framework for supporting your business’s digital needs. And the best part? You don’t have to do it alone.

At eG Innovations, we specialize in IT performance monitoring and digital experience management solutions that support a wide range of infrastructures, including virtual, cloud, and physical environments. Whether you’re running containerized applications or leveraging various cloud platforms, our comprehensive monitoring tools ensure optimal performance across all your systems.

Ready to see how our platform engineering solutions can transform your operations? Schedule your free 30-day trial with eG Innovations today.

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About the Author

Wendy holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Texas. Starting as a field technician, she moved into level 2 support in large healthcare providers and progressed to infrastructure engineering, managing production Citrix farms (4.5, 6.5, and 7.6, Storefront, PVS, etc.), supporting thousands of caregivers in the hospital system. With lots of hands-on experience of troubleshooting, debugging, and configuring Citrix XenApp, XenDesktop, Wendy now leads an eG Innovations’ team on the USA’s West Coast and manages the accounts for our Midwest and West coast clients, focusing on technologies including Citrix, VMware Horizon, IGEL, O365, and network monitoring.