Building Cloud-Native Skills in Your Organization

Platform engineering has emerged as a critical discipline for organizations looking to scale their development capabilities. By building internal platforms that provide self-service infrastructure, teams can move faster while maintaining security and compliance.

What is Platform Engineering?

Platform engineering is the practice of building and maintaining internal developer platforms (IDPs) that enable self-service capabilities for software development teams. Rather than every team managing their own infrastructure, platform engineers create standardized, automated solutions that others can consume.

Key Characteristics

• Self-Service: Developers can provision resources without waiting for operations
• Standardization: Consistent patterns reduce complexity and cognitive load
• Automation: Infrastructure as code and GitOps workflows
• Abstraction: Complexity hidden behind well-designed interfaces
• Golden Paths: Opinionated but flexible approaches to common tasks

Building Your Platform Team

Team Composition

A effective platform team typically includes:

Core Roles

• Platform Engineers (infrastructure expertise)
• Software Engineers (platform tooling)
• Site Reliability Engineers (operational excellence)
• Security Engineers (embedded security)

Supporting Roles

• Product Manager (understanding user needs)
• Technical Writer (documentation)
• Developer Advocates (adoption and feedback)

Skills to Develop

Platform engineers need a broad skill set:

Platform Engineering Principles

1. Treat Your Platform as a Product

Your developers are your customers. Apply product thinking:

• User Research: Understand developer pain points
• Roadmap Planning: Prioritize based on impact
• Feedback Loops: Continuous improvement through input
• Metrics: Measure adoption, satisfaction, and efficiency

2. Start with the Developer Experience

Work backwards from what developers need:

What do developers want to do?
    → What abstractions make that easy?
        → What infrastructure supports those abstractions?

3. Embrace Golden Paths, Not Golden Cages

Provide opinionated defaults that work well for most cases, but allow teams to customize when they have valid reasons.

Golden Path Characteristics:

• Easy to use for common scenarios
• Well-documented and supported
• Secure by default
• Observable out of the box
• Escape hatches for edge cases

4. Automate Everything

Manual processes don’t scale. Invest in automation for:

• Infrastructure provisioning
• Security scanning
• Compliance checks
• Deployment pipelines
• Monitoring setup
• Access management

Essential Platform Capabilities

Developer Self-Service Portal

A central hub where developers can:

• Provision new services and environments
• View service catalogs and documentation
• Access monitoring and logging
• Manage secrets and configuration
• Request additional resources

Infrastructure Automation

Standardized patterns for:

• Kubernetes deployments
• Database provisioning
• Message queue setup
• Caching layers
• CDN configuration

CI/CD Platform

Enable teams to:

• Build and test automatically
• Deploy with confidence
• Rollback quickly
• Promote across environments

Observability Stack

Provide comprehensive visibility:

• Metrics collection and visualization
• Log aggregation and search
• Distributed tracing
• Alerting and on-call integration

Security and Compliance

Built-in protections:

• Identity and access management
• Secrets management
• Security scanning in pipelines
• Compliance automation
• Audit logging

Measuring Platform Success

Developer Productivity Metrics

• Lead Time: From commit to production
• Deployment Frequency: How often teams deploy
• Time to First Deployment: How quickly new developers ship
• Self-Service Rate: What percentage of requests need manual intervention

Platform Health Metrics

• Availability: Platform uptime and reliability
• Performance: Response times for platform services
• Adoption: Usage of platform capabilities
• Satisfaction: Developer NPS or survey results

Business Impact Metrics

• Cost per Deployment: Infrastructure and human costs
• Security Incidents: Related to platform components
• Compliance Status: Audit results and gaps
• Time Saved: Hours freed by automation

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

Building in Isolation

Don’t design your platform without input from developers. Conduct regular user research and maintain open feedback channels.

Over-Engineering

Start simple and iterate. It’s better to have a basic platform that works than a complex one that’s never finished.

Neglecting Documentation

Your platform is only as good as its documentation. Invest in clear guides, tutorials, and API documentation.

Ignoring Existing Tools

Don’t rebuild what already works. Leverage existing open-source tools and commercial solutions where appropriate.

Forgetting Operations

A platform requires ongoing care. Plan for maintenance, updates, and incident response from the start.

Getting Started

Building a platform engineering practice is a journey. Here’s how to begin:

1. Assess Current State: Understand existing pain points and processes
2. Define Vision: What does success look like for your organization?
3. Start Small: Pick one high-value capability to build first
4. Measure and Iterate: Use data to guide improvements
5. Grow Gradually: Expand capabilities based on validated needs

Enablement Services

Building a platform team from scratch is challenging. Consider working with experienced consultants who can:

• Accelerate your platform development
• Train your team on best practices
• Provide proven patterns and architectures
• Avoid common pitfalls

Ready to build your platform engineering capability? Contact us to learn how we can help enable your team.