Make the common tasks easier
Imagine a team needs to launch a new service. They might need a test environment, a way to deploy changes, access to secrets, and alerts when something goes wrong. If every team has to arrange these from scratch, the work is slow and the results can vary.
Platform engineering is the practice of building and maintaining shared tools and processes for those tasks. A platform team might provide a template for a new service, a ready-made CI/CD pipeline, and a way for developers to create an approved development environment themselves. This is self-service: teams can complete routine tasks without waiting for another team to do each one. These parts together are sometimes called an internal developer platform. It may have a website or portal, but it does not have to.
A recommended route, with room to choose
A golden path, also called a paved road, is the platform team’s recommended way to do a common task. For example, a team might start with a template that includes deployment steps, monitoring, and security settings. The template saves repeated setup work, while the developers still build and look after their own service.
The platform works best when it solves problems developers actually face. Platform teams can ask other teams what slows them down, improve the shared tools, and document when a different approach is needed. A platform that forces every service into the same setup can create new obstacles.
How it relates to DevOps
DevOps is a way for people who build and run software to share responsibility for delivery and reliability. Platform engineering can support that way of working by making useful practices easy to follow. It describes the shared tools and experience a platform team provides, rather than a transfer of responsibility away from the teams using them.