# Understanding the Rise of Platform Engineering in 2024
Software engineering continues to evolve at a rapid pace, with new practices and roles emerging to meet the growing complexity of building, deploying, and maintaining modern applications. In 2024, one of the most significant trends reshaping engineering teams is platform engineering. This blog post delves into what platform engineering is, why it's gaining traction, and how it's transforming developer productivity across organizations.
# What is Platform Engineering?
Platform engineering is a discipline focused on designing, building, and maintaining internal platforms that provide reusable tools, services, and workflows to development teams. The primary goal of platform engineering is to empower developers by abstracting away infrastructure complexities, enabling them to ship code faster and more reliably.
A platform engineering team typically creates a self-service “Internal Developer Platform” (IDP) that brings together technologies, tools, and standards for application development, deployment, and operation. This IDP acts as a paved road, offering golden paths and guardrails so developers can focus on writing business logic rather than grappling with underlying infrastructure.
# The Differences from DevOps and SRE
While the DevOps movement brought development and operations closer together, aiming to break down silos, it often resulted in development teams assuming more responsibility for operational tasks. This led to tool sprawl, inconsistent workflows, and cognitive overload for developers.
Platform engineering complements DevOps and SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) by:
- Standardizing and automating infrastructure and environments
- Providing self-serve capabilities (e.g., provisioning databases, deployments via UI/CLI)
- Offering opinionated, secure defaults for CI/CD, monitoring, and more
Where DevOps is about culture and process integration, and SRE focuses on reliability and operations, platform engineering is about productizing the internal developer experience.
# Why is Platform Engineering Trending Now?
Several factors have contributed to the rise of platform engineering in 2024:
Developer Experience (DevEx) as a Priority: Engineering leaders recognize that superior developer experience leads to faster feature delivery and happier teams. Thoughtfully crafted platforms reduce toil and frustration for developers.
Cloud-Native Complexity: With the adoption of microservices, containers, and cloud infrastructure, managing environments and deployments has become more challenging. Internal platforms help standardize and tame this complexity.
SaaS Tool Overload: The proliferation of third-party SaaS tools (CI/CD, observability, secrets management, etc.) can lead to inconsistent security and operational practices. Platform engineering helps rationalize and integrate these tools effectively.
Security and Compliance: Centralizing standards and workflows in a platform makes it easier to enforce security policies and compliance across the organization.
# Key Components of a Modern Internal Developer Platform
A strong IDP typically encompasses:
- Infrastructure Orchestration: Automating VMs, containers, serverless, etc. (e.g., Terraform, Pulumi, Kubernetes)
- CI/CD Pipelines: Reusable templates and workflows (e.g., GitHub Actions, ArgoCD)
- Service Catalogs: Discoverable microservices, APIs, and templates (e.g., Backstage)
- Self-Serve Portals: Web UIs or CLIs for common developer actions (provisioning, deployments)
- Observability: Built-in monitoring, logging, and tracing integrated into the platform
- Security and Identity: Centralized authentication, secrets, and policy management
# Real-World Examples
Companies like Spotify, Netflix, and Airbnb have long invested in internal platforms, such as Spotify’s Backstage, which has since become an open-source standard for building custom IDPs. Many enterprises are now following suit, building their own unique platforms to speed up delivery, increase consistency, and reduce friction.
# Getting Started with Platform Engineering
If you’re considering platform engineering for your organization, here are some first steps:
- Start Small: Identify repetitive pain points or bottlenecks in your current software lifecycle and target those for automation or platformization.
- Treat the Platform as a Product: Listen to developer feedback, set a roadmap, and iterate. Assign dedicated platform product managers if possible.
- Balance Abstraction with Flexibility: Developers should have easy defaults, but your platform should also allow for advanced customization when needed.
- Encourage Adoption: Provide documentation, demos, and onboarding sessions. Make it easy for developers to migrate to the new platform.
# Conclusion
Platform engineering isn't just another buzzword—it's a strategic investment in developer productivity, reliability, and security. As software systems grow in complexity, well-designed internal platforms can help organizations achieve scale without sacrificing velocity or quality. In 2024 and beyond, expect platform engineering to become a core capability within modern software engineering teams.