Platform engineering is the science of creating toolchains and workflows that give software engineering organisations self-service capabilities in the cloud-native era. Platform engineers offer an integrated product, most frequently known as a "internal developer platform," that addresses all operational requirements over the course of an application's lifespan.

The importance of platform engineering

Let's take a step back to examine the types of difficulties a tech company confronts when it comes to the deployment and operation of software in order to comprehend why platform engineering important.

In a word, more mature, more established businesses are beginning to see the enormous potential advantages of cloud computing. However, they need the required knowledge of the cloud, infrastructure as code, containers, container orchestration, and more in order to take use of those advantages.

As a result, several of these companies are beginning to establish platform engineering teams. Such teams' primary duty is to guarantee the quick delivery of software to production.

But what actually happen with these teams?

What Does an Engineering Team for a Platform Do? "Developer enablers" or "enablement teams" are two more excellent names for platform engineering teams. To put it briefly, they develop and maintain a set of tools and processes that enable engineers to deliver code to production in a dependable and effective manner.

Another way to put it is that platform engineering teams serve as an abstraction layer between IT infrastructure and engineers. Developers can thus concentrate on creating and releasing useful features rather than worrying about the infrastructure's inner workings.

Platform engineers employ automation to make their knowledge and experience available to the company, to put it in more concrete terms. Usually, this takes the form of web portals or APIs.