Core Aspects of Platform Implementation
Platform engineering is a multidisciplinary approach that combines software engineering, system design, and operational excellence to create a reliable and scalable infrastructure for building and deploying applications. At its core, it involves not just building robust platforms, but creating a self-service environment that empowers development teams while ensuring alignment with business goals. A successful platform engineering initiative starts with the right team and a clear understanding of the problem space. This foundation enables the development of systems that streamline operations, reduce friction, and allow developers to focus on building applications rather than managing infrastructure.
Once the team is in place, the focus shifts to automating high-toil areas, identifying manual, repetitive tasks that can be automated to save time and reduce errors. Following this, an inventory of existing resources is essential, allowing teams to centralize tools and services, making them easier to manage and scale. The next step is referred to as blazing paved paths, which involve creating standard workflows and environments that ensure consistency across projects. Afterwards, deploying environments as a service helps to further streamline processes, enabling teams to quickly spin up environments on demand. At that point, the primary objective becomes optimizing self-service developer experiences, empowering developers to manage their workflows independently while ensuring they have the tools and support necessary for success. This approach transforms how development teams interact with infrastructure, creating an agile, high-performing environment for building and delivering applications.
Besides having clearly defined implementation plan, rather than approaching platform engineering as a single, broad concept, it can be helpful to break it down into four main areas to facilitate the implementation process:
- Engineering Systems, which includes the tools and services that enable development, such as CI/CD, package management, cloud-based coding environments, code scanners and linters, as well as Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistants such as GitHub Copilot.
- Application Platform, which consists of curated selection of services used as building blocks of commonly used app stacks (for example, Azure Policy, Azure Key Vault, Azure Container Apps, or Cosmos DB).
- Application Templates, which provide well-defined, organization-specific templates to facilitate workload provisioning and align with best practices.
- Developer Self-Service Capabilities, which enable developers to autonomously manage their workflows while ensuring governance and compliance with organizational standards.
Incorporating these areas into your implementation strategy reduces developer toil, fosters innovation, and creates a seamless development experience.
Build a team
In a platform engineering organization, fostering the right culture is essential for long-term success. Transitioning from a reactive to a proactive culture is key, where platform teams take responsibility for building and maintaining tools to support the organization. This shift is crucial for reducing knowledge silos and operational disruptions. The success of platform engineering efforts aligns with the investment capability outlined in the Platform Engineering Capability Model, which emphasizes moving through stages of organizational maturity—from provisional to optimizing. At the provisional stage, companies recognize the need for platform engineering but may lack full alignment between leadership and development teams. As organizations mature, executive buy-in and cultural shifts encourage a more collaborative, innovative environment where platform teams are empowered to drive meaningful change, enabling organizations to scale effectively.
A platform engineering team requires a diverse set of technical skills and a product-centric mindset to build and scale reliable, efficient, and secure internal developer platforms. Platform engineers are expected to be proficient in several key areas, including container orchestration (for example, Kubernetes), CI/CD pipelines (for example, GitHub Actions, Azure Pipelines), and monitoring tools (for example, Azure Monitor, Prometheus, Grafana). Expertise in Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform and Bicep is critical for automating infrastructure provisioning. Additionally, platform engineers should be comfortable writing code in scripting languages such as Python, PowerShell, or Bash to enable automation and integration across systems. While the talent pool for platform engineers can be challenging to tap into, a successful team should combine expertise from diverse backgrounds, such as software development, site reliability engineering (SRE), and IT operations.
Automate high toil areas
Automating high-toil areas commonly represents the first paved path on the road to enabling developer self-service capabilities. To implement it, start by identifying frequent, error-prone, or labor-intensive processes, especially those tied to manual or service-desk operations. Next, assess factors like process frequency, complexity, and auditability to prioritize automation targets. Implementing infrastructure as code (IaC) in your continuous delivery (CD) pipelines not only streamlines application deployment but also enables dynamic provisioning of shared infrastructure and tools. Use flexible CI/CD platforms like GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps, or GitOps solutions like Flux and Argo CD to reduce bottlenecks and empower teams.
Over time, adopting the "Everything as Code" (EaC) pattern creates a secure and repeatable automation framework, using centralized Git repositories for IaC templates and configurations (including, for example, Bicep and Azure Resource Manager templates, Terraform manifest files, and Helm charts). These repositories, managed by an operations team, enable developers to submit pull requests that are securely reviewed and audited before merging. The same CI/CD tools can then provision and configure any infrastructure, tools, or services—whether application-specific or shared. This approach supports scalability, developer self-service, and seamless integration with governance processes, ensuring that platform engineering aligns with organizational goals while fostering operational agility.
The "Everything as Code" approach revolves around representing nearly any resource or process as a file in a secure Git repository. Git's robust security features—such as commit history, access controls, pull requests, and branch protections—ensure transparency, enable collaborative reviews, and enforce automated checks before changes are integrated. Combined with CI/CD systems, this creates a versatile, auditable, and secure framework for managing infrastructure, tools, and processes.
Inventory and centralize
As organizations grow, the volume and complexity of their technical assets expand, often leading to duplication of efforts, orphaned projects, and wasted resources. Centralizing inventory and asset tracking is a critical step in platform engineering to address these challenges. An inventory system allows teams to track and manage assets like code, APIs, containers, virtual machines (VMs), permissions, and more. This process not only improves governance but also promotes reuse and enhances discoverability, enabling teams to operate more efficiently and effectively.
Centralized inventories play a vital role in improving governance by tagging and organizing assets. Proper tagging ensures that resources are associated with their respective owners or teams, making it easier to manage lifecycles and understand the potential impact of changes. Enhanced discoverability is another key benefit, as it reduces technical sprawl by helping teams find and reuse existing resources, preventing unnecessary duplication of effort. Additionally, centralizing inventories helps organizations optimize resources by identifying and cleaning up outdated or unnecessary assets, leading to reduced waste and increased cost savings.
Various tools support inventory and asset tracking, each catering to different aspects of the technical ecosystem. For instance, Azure Deployment Environments (ADE) provides a way to track complex infrastructure created through Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Similarly, Azure API Center enables developers to discover and manage APIs efficiently. Package registries such as GitHub Packages or Azure Artifacts offer extra value by improving supply chain security and managing approved packages and SDKs.
To further enhance the benefits of inventory systems, organizations can establish relational links between assets to create a more comprehensive view of their ecosystem. For example, mapping the relationships between an API definition, its code repository, associated environments, and governance policies allow teams to manage resources with greater precision.
Blaze paved paths
In platform engineering, the "paved path" analogy conveys the balance between fostering innovation and providing standardized guidance. Initially, teams may take varied, informal paths to achieve their goals, experimenting with different tools and workflows. Over time, platform teams observe the most effective and widely adopted approaches and convert them into "paved paths"—optimized workflows that are efficient, user-friendly, and compelling for teams to adopt.
This process, often described as "blazing paved paths," involves identifying common patterns in team workflows and transforming them into standardized, scalable solutions. These paths seamlessly integrate security, architectural best practices, and compliance requirements, offering a smooth and reliable experience. Developers benefit from reduced cognitive load, consistent APIs for integration, modular capabilities that can be combined as needed, and predictable performance that aligns with operational goals.
The Platform Engineering Capability Model plays a pivotal role in this process, helping organizations determine when to transition from informal paths to paved ones. It identifies areas requiring standardization and provides insights into how to scale these practices effectively. This structured approach ensures innovation isn't stifled while maintaining a focus on quality, compliance, and performance.
The blaze paved paths approach encourages good practices without being overly prescriptive. It supports community contributions, enabling teams to collaborate and shape the platform while retaining flexibility for unique use cases. By balancing innovation and standardization, this methodology fosters an environment where teams can excel while ensuring organizational requirements are consistently met.
Deploy environments as a service
Deploying environments as a service is designed to enable secure, standardized, and automated provisioning of infrastructure. A key principle in this approach is persisting provisioning identities and secrets in a way that prevents developers from accessing them directly. This enforces governance while ensuring infrastructure updates remain secure. For instance, Azure Deployment Environments (ADE) exemplify this model by supporting role separation and centralizing the management of IaC templates.
With ADE, platform engineers and operations teams collaboratively build and maintain a catalog of templates for specific environment types. These templates, enriched with pre-configured settings, integrate managed identities and control access based on roles. Developers can then use CI/CD pipelines to provision infrastructure through tools like the Azure CLI or Azure Developer CLI, without needing direct access to sensitive credentials or the underlying subscription. This separation ensures compliance and security while preserving developer productivity.
Even if ADE isn’t in use, the same principles can be applied more broadly, with infrastructure as code (IaC) content sourced from secure, immutable locations and secret management automated and isolated. By enabling these practices, platform engineering empowers teams to deploy consistent environments while maintaining organizational governance and operational efficiency.
Optimize self-service developer experience
A seamless self-service developer experience is crucial for platform engineering success, but achieving this often requires meeting users where they are. Every role—developers, operations, and others—gravitate towards specific tools and environments that define their workflows. For new experiences to gain adoption, it’s important to align with these existing “centers of gravity.” A pragmatic approach involves planning multiple user interfaces tailored to the tools already in use, allowing teams to start with simple enhancements, prove their value, and evolve toward more sophisticated solutions as needs arise.
Instead of creating entirely new experiences, consider enhancing and integrating existing tools. Platforms like editors, Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), DevOps suites, CLI tools, and low-code environments often have extensibility models that allow customization and expansion with minimal overhead. This approach reduces maintenance, applies familiar user experiences, and accelerates adoption. For example, web-based IDE extensions, like those built for VS Code or vscode.dev, provide a flexible, web-compatible starting point that can scale to local development environments. Similarly, ChatOps interfaces in tools like Microsoft Teams or Slack offer intuitive ways to trigger automation workflows and integrate with CI/CD platforms.
For organizations needing a centralized interface, investing in a custom developer portal can provide long-term benefits but requires careful planning and resources. Solutions like Backstage.io, a toolkit initially developed by Spotify, offer highly customizable portals that can integrate plugins and third-party tools, creating a dynamic developer-centric hub. Whether you start with lightweight solutions like Power Pages or build out a comprehensive portal, the goal is to deliver scalable, user-friendly experiences that empower developers while aligning with organizational needs.