Platform engineering
Platform engineering is the discipline of building internal products that make it straightforward for product teams to build, ship and operate software.
What is platform engineering?
Platform engineering is the discipline of building internal products that make it straightforward for product teams to build, ship and operate software.
Plain and technical
A platform team builds the paved road (the standard way to create a service, deploy it and run it), so every product team does not have to invent its own.
Platform engineering treats the internal platform as a product with users, adoption metrics and a roadmap. Its central design constraint is that the paved path must be genuinely easier than the alternatives, because a mandated path that is harder produces workarounds. Adoption is measured through scorecards and delivery metrics rather than asserted.
What it looks like in practice
Nearby vocabulary
DevOps
DevOps is a way of working in which the people who build software share responsibility for running it, with automation that makes small change safe.
Site reliability engineering
Site reliability engineering applies software engineering to operations, using reliability objectives and error budgets to balance stability and speed.
How DevOpsArk handles platform engineering
Articles on this subject
DevOps platform or toolchain? An honest comparison
The real trade-off between assembling best-of-breed tools and adopting an integrated platform, including the costs of each that vendors on both sides tend not to mention.
What is DevOps? A definition that survives contact with practice
What DevOps actually means, where the definition came from, what the lifecycle looks like in practice, and the common misreadings that turn it into a job title instead of a way of working.
More definitions
See these concepts in a running system
A 30-minute walkthrough against your own infrastructure rather than a slide about the theory.