Caution:_ Platform is a widely used term to define various types of platforms, so be careful about using it. At one place, we chose not to use the term platform in the team name and just called it the Infrastructure team since there was another AI platform team. Another place we called it the Infrastructure Platform Team. Use the term that makes sense for your organization, but the concept remains the same. Just don’t call it a “DevOps team” due to obvious reasons._

What is Platform Engineering?

In this age of digital transformation, companies are continually looking to innovate to gain a competitive advantage. One way to gain a competitive advantage is to have an efficient mechanism for deploying & operating applications in production that enables teams to provide features to end-users faster. To achieve that, many companies realized that it helps to have a dedicated team that builds & maintains a common platform and constantly looks to innovate how applications are deployed and operated in Production. This practice of creating a common platform as a product is called Platform Engineering. See below my definition of Platform Engineering:

Platform Engineering is a practice of building and operating a common platform as a product for technology teams. It reduces time to market and complexity by providing self-service deployments for infrastructure and application and ease of operating applications in production. The team building and operating the common platform constantly innovates and provides best practices implementation, tools, and automation.

The application development teams and other technology teams are still responsible for building, deploying, and operating their applications, but they use the platform in a self-service manner to help simplify things for them.

#automation #infrastructure #platform-engineering #devops #cloud-computing