Platform engineering is the practice of building internal tools and self service workflows that help software teams manage systems more efficiently. Platform engineers reduce repetitive manual work by creating secure and reusable services for developers and technical teams.
Imagine a large company with hundreds of teams and thousands of employees.
Now imagine Jack, a new employee who needs access to a server so he can learn about the environment and begin his work. Jack asks his team where he can get access, but they direct him to another team. That team has to pause its own work to respond, only to explain that they do not manage the access he needs.
After several messages, multiple people have been disrupted, and Jack still cannot start his work.
Now imagine a platform engineering approach.
Instead of contacting several teams, Jack logs into an internal portal, selects the access he needs, submits the request and gets straight to work.
Now scale that across more than 100 requests a day, 2,000 requests a month and 24,000 requests a year. These requests could include server access, cloud environments, application deployments, monitoring, permissions and many other common tasks.
In simple terms, platform engineers take repeatable work normally completed by DevOps engineers, system administrators and other technical teams, then turn it into secure, reliable and self-service tools.