Digital Transformation and the role of Platform Engineering

Platform engineering is emerging as a key piece in the digital transformation of companies. Aimed at optimizing software delivery and easing the burden on development teams, this practice has gained prominence, being classified by Gartner for two consecutive years as one of the 10 Key Strategic Technology Trends. Platform engineering accelerates the development of vertical solutions, increases product delivery speed, and facilitates connectivity across different environments.

The concept of platform engineering can be understood as a set of tools, capabilities, and processes designed to be consumed easily by developers and end users, resulting in increased user productivity and relieving the load on development teams, allowing them to focus on higher-value tasks.

In this article, we will explore the concept of platform engineering, highlighting its benefits, challenges, and the trends shaping this practice. To inspire you, we will also present the success case of Spotify, a reference in the implementation of efficient platforms. Happy reading!

What is platform engineering?

Platform engineering is an emerging field of software engineering focused on creating and maintaining internal platforms to support the work of developers and other technical teams. Its main objective is to provide a common and consistent foundation of tools, services, and infrastructure that enable software development, deployment, and operation more efficiently and at scale.

How does platform engineering work?

Platform engineering involves creating a dedicated support platform, maintained by a specialized team, that provides reusable tools and resources to meet the needs of software developers and other technical teams.

Source: https://www.gartner.com.br/pt-br/artigos/o-que-e-engenharia-de-plataforma

Below are the main points on how platform engineering works:

Dedicated team for platform creation and maintenance

Everything starts with a dedicated product team responsible for designing and maintaining the platform. This platform is tailored to provide support to software development teams, offering reusable tools and resources that facilitate developers’ work and interaction with complex infrastructures. This same team is also responsible for ensuring that the platform meets the needs of the business and its end users.

Customization to meet specific needs

The functioning of the engineering platform is guided by the needs of its end users, who are typically developers and operations engineers. Therefore, the platform team needs to deeply understand these needs, prioritize demands, and create solutions that are truly useful for the target audience. Each company may have different requirements, so platforms are customized to reflect these specificities.

Use of internal portals for developers

One of the first steps in creating an engineering platform is the development of internal developer portals. These portals are more mature and consolidate a set of selected tools, processes, and resources to facilitate developers’ work. Specialists in the field configure these portals to ensure they are user-friendly and provide the most relevant resources for development teams.

Focus on self-service experience

The ultimate goal is to provide a frictionless self-service experience. This means that developers and specialists can access the tools and resources they need independently, without relying on other departments. The platform should present everything clearly and organized, focusing on simplifying the development process, reducing cognitive load on users, and allowing them to concentrate on higher-value tasks.

Increased productivity and reduced costs

The platform is designed to increase developer productivity by centralizing resources and eliminating redundancies. With self-service and automation, the platform reduces the time spent on operational tasks and lowers operational expenses, helping teams deliver software more quickly and at a lower cost.

Modern tools and integration with DevOps

With the evolution of modern tools, platform engineering has become one of the most important themes in the DevOps community; these new tools aim to facilitate the creation and maintenance of platforms, improving integration between development and operations teams and making processes more efficient. Additionally, they help automate tasks, provision resources, and monitor systems, simplifying life for technical teams.

What are the principles of platform engineering?

The principles of Platform Engineering guide the creation, maintenance, and optimization of internal platforms that support software development efficiently and at scale. The fundamental principle is to enable developers and other technical teams to perform their tasks autonomously without relying on constant technical specialist intervention.

Another important principle is that the platform should be designed to grow with the company, ensuring scalability without compromising performance, promoting automation and optimized resource usage, ensuring operational efficiency.

We have highlighted three other principles that will guide you in this process:

Reuse of components

The platform should encourage the reuse of components, libraries, and services to avoid duplicating efforts and ensure consistency throughout the organization. This also enhances productivity by providing tested and reliable building blocks for new projects.

Integrated security and reliability

Security should not be a step added at the end, but rather an intrinsic element throughout the platform architecture. Compliance with security and privacy standards, as well as ensuring high availability and reliability, are essential for protecting data and operations.

Observability and monitoring

A good platform provides clear visibility into application performance and the infrastructure itself. This includes logs, metrics, and distributed tracing, so that issues can be identified and resolved quickly, maintaining system stability and efficiency.

How does platform engineering contribute to innovation and agility in companies?

According to data from Gartner, by 2026, 80% of large software engineering organizations will have established platform engineering teams to act as internal service providers of reusable services, components, and tools focused on application delivery.

Platform engineering promises to solve one of the main challenges companies face: effective collaboration between operations and software development. By providing the necessary infrastructure and tools, platform engineering will enable development teams to focus on innovating and delivering value swiftly, boosting companies’ ability to respond efficiently to market demands.

Here are the main ways to gain more agility and innovation through platform engineering:

Accelerating the development cycle

Platform engineering creates an environment where developers can execute their tasks quickly and efficiently, thanks to automation and self-service tools. Processes that were once manual and time-consuming, such as setting up infrastructure, provisioning servers, or CI/CD pipelines, become automatic. This reduces development time and the delivery of new products, allowing the company to respond more quickly to market changes.

• Example: Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) pipelines automate code testing and deployment, enabling new features and bug fixes to reach the market quickly.

Reducing barriers to innovation

By providing a common and standardized infrastructure, platform engineering frees developers from repetitive and complex operational tasks, such as server configuration or maintaining test environments. This allows them to focus on innovations and creating new products and services.

• Example: with an internal self-service platform, developers can quickly create environments to experiment with new technologies or test new ideas without relying on approvals or waiting time from other teams.

Scalability and flexibility

With a platform that adapts to the company’s growth, teams can initiate new projects or handle demand spikes without worrying about infrastructure limitations.

• Example: in a rapidly growing scenario, the ability to provision new resources automatically in cloud environments allows new services or features to be launched without delays.

Rapid adaptation to new technologies

Platform engineering facilitates the adoption of new technologies, allowing teams to implement and integrate new services, programming languages, or frameworks more agilely, without compromising existing infrastructure. This creates an environment conducive to experimentation and continuous innovation.

• Example: if a team wants to test a new database or container tool, the platform can provide the necessary infrastructure without complex manual reconfigurations.

What are the challenges of implementing platform engineering?

A study conducted by Forrester Consulting in partnership with Qt Group, which interviewed 317 decision-makers, revealed that two-thirds of respondents believe that platform engineering improves the end-user experience. However, the report also highlights significant challenges.

The main obstacle identified is the talent shortage, a problem that exacerbates already existing difficulties in implementing platform engineering. About 50% of participants pointed out the lack of qualified professionals as the biggest roadblock to the success of engineering platform strategies.

And the challenges do not stop there, check out the others pointed out by the report:

Reuse and adaptation

About 50% of companies face difficulties in balancing the reuse of standardized, high-quality components with the need to adapt platforms to various use cases, including different types of hardware and software solutions.

Multiple devices and operating systems

More than half of companies reported that working with multiple devices, operating systems, and form factors is a challenging task. The diversity of environments makes it more complex to integrate and support these systems.

Collaboration and lack of processes

Four in ten companies highlighted the difficulty in collaboration between design, development, testing, and deployment teams. Integration between these functions is essential, but often limited due to communication gaps and lack of clear processes. Not to mention that 44% of companies state that embedded systems lack unified UI/UX design processes. This affects accessibility and inclusion, creating a lack of consistency in design and end-user experience.

Cultural resistance

In addition to technical difficulties, there is also the integration of legacy platforms and the cultural resistance of teams, which often oppose changes or the adoption of new technological practices.

Despite the challenges, nearly all respondents stated that their company’s leadership continues to support platform engineering strategies. This is not by chance: platform engineering remains a strategic choice, offering significant benefits, such as improving user experience and increasing competitiveness in the market. These results reinforce the long-term value of this approach, even in the face of obstacles such as talent shortages.

How does platform engineering impact system and application architecture?

The statement by Paul Delory, vice president analyst at Gartner: “Platform engineering arose in response to the growing complexity of modern software architectures. Today, non-specialist end users are often asked to operate a confusing set of arcane services,” emphasizes the complexity of modern system architectures and the importance of the emergence of platform engineering as a solution to this complexity.

Platform engineering promotes structural and operational changes that affect how applications are designed, implemented, tested, and maintained. Below are the key aspects of the impact of platform engineering on system architecture:

Adoption of microservices architecture

Encourages the adoption of a microservices based architecture, where applications are divided into small independent services that communicate with each other through APIs, this approach facilitates scalability, resilience, and agility in the development and deployment of new features.

• Impact:
  • Each team can work autonomously on its own services without interfering in the development of other system components.
  • Facilitates horizontal scalability, allowing different microservices to be scaled individually as per demand.
  • Improves modularity and component reuse, as smaller services can be developed and maintained independently.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Platform engineering promotes the use of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), which allows defining, provisioning, and managing IT infrastructure through scripts and versioned code. This provides consistency and automation in environment configuration, helping to standardize infrastructure across various teams and projects.

• Impact:
  • Infrastructure becomes an integral part of systems architecture, easily replicable, auditable, and modifiable through versioning.
  • Facilitates the creation of identical development, testing, and production environments, minimizing the “it works on my machine” problem.
  • Enables the automatic and programmatic scaling of resources, improving efficiency and reducing the time to provision new services.
• The operation of the application, monitoring, and failure detection are incorporated from the outset in the architectural design, making the system more resilient and easier to monitor.

Abstraction of infrastructure and cloud

Promotes the abstraction of underlying infrastructure, allowing developers to focus on business logic and functionality development without the need to manage infrastructure directly. This approach is widely facilitated by the use of cloud computing and platforms that automate resource provisioning.

• Impact:
  • Applications are designed to be infrastructure-independent, facilitating portability between different cloud providers or on-premise environments.
  • The system architecture becomes more flexible, able to easily leverage various cloud services, such as distributed storage, load balancers, and auto-scaling.
  • Infrastructure automation improves operational efficiency, allowing new environments to be created on demand for testing or new services.

Ease of testing and deployment

Platform engineering provides a solid foundation for test automation and deployment, which directly influences how applications are architected, promoting the creation of modular and easily testable systems.

• Impact:
  • Applications are divided into components that can be tested and deployed independently, reducing the risk of a failure in one component affecting others.
  • The use of containers and orchestrators like Kubernetes allows applications to be deployed in isolated environments, facilitating large-scale testing and continuous deployments.

What is the relationship between platform engineering and AI?

The latest research from Platform Engineering, which gathered input from over 200 platform engineering professionals, reveals that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has not yet been fully realized in these professionals’ daily work, as just over half (52%) of respondents work with AI at some level, while 37% do not work with it but want to, and 14% do not plan to. Nevertheless, we cannot ignore the fact that AI is one of the main trends in platform engineering.

AI, especially Large Language Models (LLMs), is closely related to platform engineering and brings a number of significant improvements in how platforms are designed and managed. LLMs have the ability to automate repetitive tasks, improve resource discovery within internal platforms, and provide real-time support for developers and engineers.

Better resource discovery

With the ability to process natural language, LLMs allow developers to explore the resources of an internal platform, querying code examples, documentation, and command syntax more efficiently. This makes it easier to use underlying technologies without the need to navigate extensive documentation.

Advanced developer support

LLMs specifically trained for an organization’s context can act as virtual assistants within the platform, offering real-time support, troubleshooting technical issues, and quickly and accurately answering queries. This reduces the number of support tickets and improves the overall developer experience.

Communication between teams

LLMs can also be used to help engineering teams communicate better with non-technical stakeholders, creating plain language reports on platform performance and important metrics such as the number of deployments and time savings. This improves transparency and collaboration between technical and executive teams.

Despite the benefits, it is important for organizations to implement adequate protections when using LLMs to avoid security risks, such as the introduction of malicious code or data leaks, highlighting the need for precautions when using this technology. This convergence between platform engineering and AI promises to make IT operations more efficient, optimized, and scalable, allowing development teams to innovate more quickly and effectively.

What are the trends in platform engineering?

In the last two years, platform engineering has evolved from a specialized segment with a few professionals to become one of the trends in the cloud-native technology landscape. Furthermore, there are expectations for significant growth and important changes in its implementation.

According to the 2023 State of Platform Engineering Report, there are four main trends:

Increased focus on infrastructure abstraction

Platforms should make it easier for developers to abstract the complexity of the underlying infrastructure, helping to reduce cognitive load, allowing them to focus more on delivering value and less on operational issues such as server and network configuration.

Popularization of service catalogs

These service catalogs are expected to become more user-friendly and accessible, simplifying use for development teams and accelerating automation.

Greater focus on developer experience (DevEx)

Companies are paying more attention to DevEx, with platforms being developed to improve developers’ efficiency and satisfaction. This includes the development of self-service platforms that eliminate the need for tickets and waiting for operational support.

Growth of platform engineering communities

Interest in internal platforms is rapidly growing, with the platform engineering community expanding globally. Conferences such as PlatformCon and the increase of meetups are signs that this area is consolidating as a key component for the future of DevOps and IT infrastructure.

These trends reflect the importance of platform engineering as a key piece for companies seeking to improve their efficiency, scalability, and innovation capacity, especially in cloud and DevOps environments. Companies are increasingly investing in dedicated teams to build internal platforms that enhance the developer experience and accelerate software delivery.

Success Case

Spotify is a reference in platform engineering implementation, even being referred to in job postings due to the Platform Mission, which is one of the best definitions of engineering platform we have today.

The Platform Mission was created to connect developers and engineers, aiming to enhance teams’ efficiency through the creation of tools, structures, and capabilities that facilitate internal work. One of the standout results was the development of Backstage, a developer portal that centralizes data, documentation, and tools, providing a cohesive experience for all 6,000 engineers in the company.

Currently, the Mission manages an internal marketplace of microservices, helping teams navigate the company’s resources. Additionally, Spotify employs gamification and standardization techniques, such as FleetShift, to ensure that teams adhere to high-quality development standards and can carry out major refactorings in an automated way.

This effort has resulted in a reduction in developer integration time, which decreased from 60 days to just 20, following the adoption of simplified and standardized processes. Initiatives like this contribute to Spotify scaling its global operation with agility while keeping constant innovation at the center of its operations.

Why hire a partner like Objective?

Technology companies face a significant challenge in balancing the creation of innovative products with the complex management of system architecture. For internal teams, the overload of dealing with infrastructure, security, and scalability can not only reduce productivity but also increase the risk of burnout. Platform engineering plays a vital role in alleviating this pressure, allowing teams to focus on what they do best: creating solutions that drive the business.

By partnering with a company like Objective, your business can ensure that platform engineering is managed by specialists who excel in market best practices, keeping your business agile, secure, and optimized. We have extensive experience in large businesses, from optimizing resources in cloud environments to implementing automations that accelerate the development cycle. Contact our specialists to find out how we can help you.