As cloud-native architectures mature, many DevOps teams are hitting a ceiling. What once served as a nimble bridge between development and operations is now straining under the weight of complex tooling, fragmented workflows, and growing scalability demands. Platform engineering is emerging as a strategic evolution, designed to restore developer velocity, drive consistency, and support enterprise-scale delivery.
Why Platform Engineering?
DevOps brought automation, infrastructure as code, and cultural alignment between development and operations. But as organizations expand their teams, services, and environments, these foundational tools alone are no longer sufficient. Developers are now spending more time navigating fragmented CI/CD pipelines, managing infrastructure configurations, and waiting on permissions than writing business logic.
Platform engineering addresses this problem by treating infrastructure and tooling as a product. Platform engineers build internal developer platforms (IDPs) that abstract complexity and enable developer self-service. According to Gartner, by 2026, 75 percent of organizations with platform teams will provide internal developer portals to improve the developer experience and boost productivity.
Internal Developer Platforms and Portals
At the heart of platform engineering are internal developer portals. These interfaces provide developers with standardized access to templates, documentation, infrastructure provisioning, and service deployment.
One of the most widely adopted tools leading this trend is Backstage, an open-source framework created by Spotify. Backstage offers a centralized software catalog, scaffolding tools, and a plugin system that lets platform teams create a customized developer experience. This streamlines everything from onboarding to deployment and service discovery.
Other platforms like Port, Humanitec, and OpsLevel are enabling similar transformations by helping organizations to reduce cognitive overhead, enforce governance, and scale operations efficiently.
Organizational Implications
The shift from DevOps to platform engineering is not just technical. It requires changes in structure and culture. Platform engineering teams should not function as internal service desks. Instead, they operate as product teams with roadmaps, user feedback loops, and performance metrics.
Key Changes Include:
- New Team Structures
DevOps generalists evolve into specialized platform teams that focus on building reusable infrastructure and internal tooling. - A Product Mindset
The internal platform is treated like a product. Its success is measured by developer satisfaction, adoption rates, and delivery speed, not just uptime or issue resolution. - Golden Paths
Platform engineers define preferred workflows that embed best practices, reducing friction and increasing reliability across teams. - Built-in Governance
Security, compliance, and architectural standards are baked into the platform by design, removing the need for manual enforcement.
Developer Experience as a KPI
Traditional operations teams were measured by uptime and incident response. Platform engineering shifts the focus to developer experience. Success is evaluated by different metrics like:
- Time to first deployment
- Time to onboard a new service
- Number of tools used in a workflow
- Developer satisfaction surveys
A 2024 report from Port revealed that in organizations without internal platforms, developers spent up to four hours daily on tasks unrelated to coding. Internal developer portals significantly reduce this waste by enabling engineers to deploy services independently, without waiting on operations teams.
Real-World Adoption
Leading companies like Spotify, Netflix, and LinkedIn have already embraced platform engineering. Spotify’s portal, powered by Backstage, supports hundreds of teams and thousands of microservices. LinkedIn’s platform team curates tooling, templates, and environments for a global developer workforce.
Smaller enterprises are also seeing success. By starting with a focused platform team and targeting specific bottlenecks, organizations can achieve early wins and gradually expand their platform capabilities.
Action Plan for IT Leaders
If you’re guiding an IT or engineering team, consider the following steps to begin the shift toward platform engineering:
- Identify Bottlenecks
Conduct interviews and workflow reviews to locate friction in service creation, deployment, and access to infrastructure. - Form a Platform Team
Assemble a cross-functional group of infrastructure engineers, SREs, and tool specialists. Empower them to design and own internal platforms with a clear mission. - Deploy a Developer Portal
Choose a framework like Backstage or a commercial solution like OpsLevel. Start small with a service catalog and expand to support templates, infrastructure, and observability. - Set Metrics and Collect Feedback
Establish DevEx benchmarks. Use surveys, analytics, and usage data to refine the platform iteratively. - Scale Thoughtfully
Avoid trying to support every workflow at once. Focus on high-impact use cases first, then broaden support as adoption grows.
Looking Ahead
Platform engineering is not a replacement for DevOps. It is a logical next step that builds on DevOps principles while enabling scalability and consistency. As cloud-native systems grow in complexity, internal platforms become vital for maintaining agility and autonomy across teams.
If your developers are spending more time dealing with environments than building products, it’s definitely time to rethink the structure. Investing in platform engineering isn’t just smart but is essential for long-term velocity and resilience.