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Platform Engineering

🌿 Growing
Created: Jan 19, 2025
Updated: Jan 19, 2025
engineering devops infrastructure

Platform Engineering is the discipline of designing and building internal platforms that serve as products for an organization’s developers, improving their experience and productivity.

Core Principle: Platform as Product

Organizations that treat their platform as an internal product designed to improve developer experience see significantly greater returns on technology investments, including AI adoption.

Key aspects:

  • Developer Experience Focus: Platform designed around developer needs
  • Self-Service Capabilities: Developers can provision resources independently
  • Standardization: Consistent tooling and workflows across teams
  • Automation: Reduced manual toil and cognitive load

Impact on AI Strategy

According to DORA’s 2025 research:

  • Poor developer experience and fragmented tooling hamper AI strategy effectiveness
  • Well-designed platforms amplify the benefits of [[AI Adoption]]
  • Platform quality acts as a multiplier for AI investments

Components

A robust platform typically includes:

  • [[Internal Platform]] infrastructure
  • CI/CD pipelines
  • Monitoring and observability
  • Security and compliance tooling
  • Documentation and onboarding

Source: [[State of AI-assisted Software Development 2025 (DORA Report)]]

Linked References

  • [[6 Archetypes of Broken Ownership]]

    Explores six archetypes of broken ownership when knowledge, mandate, or responsibility are missing, …

  • [[Broken Ownership Archetypes]]

    Six patterns of broken ownership that occur when Knowledge, Mandate, or Responsibility are missing.

  • [[Broken Windows Theory]]

    Theory that visible signs of disorder encourage further disorder. In software, tech debt compounds …

  • [[Ownership Trio]]

    True ownership requires three interdependent components: Knowledge, Mandate, and Responsibility.

  • [[You Build It, You Own It]]

    Philosophy that teams should fully own what they build, not just run it—encompassing knowledge, …

  • [[Theory of Constraints]]

    A system is only as strong as its weakest point. Focus on the bottleneck and optimize the entire …

  • [[AI Adoption]]

    The process of integrating AI tools and practices into an organization.

  • [[DORA]]

    DevOps Research and Assessment - research program studying software delivery performance.

  • [[Flexibility Over Rigidity]]

    Resilience comes from flexibility, not rigidity - like redwoods that bend with the wind.

  • [[Internal Platform]]

    Infrastructure and tooling built for internal developer use within an organization.

  • [[State of AI-assisted Software Development 2025 (DORA Report)]]

    DORA’s 2025 research on AI’s impact on software development, revealing AI as an …

  • [[Value Stream Mapping]]

    A lean management technique for visualizing and analyzing the flow of work through a system.

Hrishikesh Bhaskaran ♥ 2025