How platform engineering is shaping the API landscape

Platform engineering is a core discipline in modern software development, offering self-service delivery capabilities that enhance the developer experience by creating scalable and repeatable workflows and toolchains. It emerged to address the complexities of cloud-native applications and complements DevOps by alleviating developers' operational burdens. Unlike DevOps, which fosters collaboration between development and operations teams, platform engineering provides developers with self-service access to infrastructure and deployment resources through internal developer platforms. These platforms rely heavily on APIs for integration, allowing platform engineers to design and consume APIs to automate processes and orchestrate workflows. A case study of a North American banking institution illustrates the impact of platform engineering, as the bank successfully transitioned from individual team-managed delivery pipelines to a centralized approach with multiple platform engineering teams. This shift included the development of an internal developer portal, automation of infrastructure and API gateway configurations, and the implementation of chaos engineering tools, which significantly enhanced the developer experience and promoted a consume-first development model. As a result, platform engineering has become integral to organizations aiming to streamline their cloud-native initiatives and API programs.