What is Platform Engineering and Why Does It Matter?

Platform engineering is a crucial discipline for building technology platforms that drive DevOps efficiency, agility, and productivity in cloud-native development. It refers to the practice of designing and building technology platforms that enable modern DevOps teams to efficiently deliver digital services and create better products for their customers. Platform engineers work to understand the needs of developers within an organization and provide an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) that helps drive developer efficiency, increase productivity, reduce time to market, improve quality, and drive innovation. The goal of a platform engineer is to enable self-service for app development teams by designing, building, and maintaining an IDP, which provides a set of standardized tools and services that developers can use to build, test, and deploy applications. Platform engineering provides a real solution for enabling developer productivity in the era of complex cloud-native development, and its success depends on how well platform engineers understand the needs of the business and developers they support.