In an industry inundated by buzzwords, “platform engineering” is the latest darling of tech discussions. Buzzwords like this are common in IT because they help communicate complex ideas in just a few syllables.
So, is this the case with platform engineering? Is it truly something new and revolutionary? Or is it just the DevOps methodology and site reliability engineering (SRE) wearing a different label?
Let’s dissect these contrasting perspectives.
What is platform engineering?
Platform engineering is a software engineering discipline, specifically within the broader domain of DevOps and cloud-native development, concentrating on designing, building, and maintaining a shared self-service internal developer platform (IDP).
The goal here is to streamline and enhance developer productivity and accelerate software delivery across the entire organization. In that sense, platform engineering provides software engineers with a smooth, efficient, and standardized experience, abstracting away the complexities of underlying infrastructure and tooling.
As software development grows more complex, the role of platform engineer is rapidly cementing its place as a key enabler of digital capabilities, prioritizing automation while employing DevOps best practices to achieve the best experience for the development team.
According to Gartner, 45% of enterprise software engineering companies were using platform engineering teams in 2022. That number is poised to grow to as large as 80% by 2026.
This isn’t surprising, as platform engineering often leads to measurable outcomes, including reduced deployment times, infrastructure costs, and improved developer productivity.
Is platform engineering just a buzzword to disguise inefficiencies?
If you get into a discussion with some DevOps and SRE teams, many will point out that they have been doing the same thing as the platform team for years.
While some of these concepts may sound familiar, they are not exactly the same. For example, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) already enables developers to use third-party cloud platforms for development projects. But that’s not exactly internal.
If we go back further, we can see integrated development environments (IDEs) where developers could write quality code without a separate text editor and compiler to build it. But that’s not the same, since IDEs only focus on the individual developer and lack a comprehensive impact across the development team. In contrast, platform engineering concentrates on the whole organization.
The major cultural shift already occurred with DevOps. When DevOps first reared its head, it quickly broke down silos, pushed code faster, and made developers and operations teams play nice. SRE took it up a notch by slapping engineering rigor onto operational chaos. For example, they were able to do this with service level agreements (SLAs) and error budgets.
However, if we look at the job descriptions for platform engineers, we can quickly find familiar responsibilities:
- Building deployment pipelines
- Managing cloud infrastructure
- Creating developer self-service capabilities
- Automating away operational toil
We can’t blame some developers who perceive platform engineering as a buzzword used to mask inefficiencies instead of fixing broken processes or upskilling people. However, their point of view fails to capture the essence of platform engineering.
Platform engineering isn’t a replacement for DevOps or SRE—it’s their secret weapon
Platform engineering, DevOps, and SREs have some shared DNA: they all aim to improve software delivery and overlap in tools (like Docker and Terraform) and goals (efficiency and reliability). Platform engineering quickly pays off because of its ability to streamline workflows and improve developer experience through self-service tools and standardized platforms.
Unlike traditional DevOps or SRE implementations that may focus more on operational efficiency or incident response, platform engineering is intentionally structured to address systemic developer friction at its root.
Platform engineering aims to build self-service internal platforms with powerful tools and workflows that will truly benefit developers. In this scenario, platform engineers are like product managers for internal tools, serving developers.
Untangling platform engineering from DevOps methodologies and SRE frameworks
The DevOps methodology is a cultural movement championing enhanced team collaboration and automation, while SRE prioritizes system reliability through software engineering. Platform engineering doesn’t replace the cultural and procedural aspects of DevOps culture. Instead, it provides the technical foundation to make DevOps best practices sustainable at scale.
For example, platform engineers build organized groups called platforms that are made up of resources and services; DevOps engineers can use those platforms without managing them. Platform engineering teams built these internal platforms leveraging some of the same tools, technologies, and skills available across DevOps teams.
DevOps teams create high-level principles to improve workflows through collaboration and automation, and platform engineers develop purpose-built, structured toolchains to implement those principles.
Platform engineers also build internal platforms for SREs. For example, Quali Torque continuously monitors the state of infrastructure and environments, identifies drift, self-corrects infrastructure errors, diagnoses other errors, and allows anyone to execute day-2 operations in a single click via a streamlined experience. All of this reduces the time needed to perform SRE tasks at scale.
In other words, by building and maintaining the infrastructure where DevOps and SRE teams work, platform engineering teams help better serve their needs. For example, DevOps teams can execute key tasks independently with seamless access to self-service platforms built by platform engineers.
Platform engineering teams prioritize establishing a comprehensive developer experience where all project-related resources are available in a centralized hub. This centralized location also makes it easier for platform engineering teams to enforce security and compliance consistently. It also helps that the platform engineering team can develop the platform to support DevOps and SRE activities.
The key differences between the three distinct approaches are as follows:
| Platform Engineering | DevOps | SRE | |
| Goal | Developing robust internal platforms to reduce developer friction, standardize processes, improve scalability, and accelerate software delivery. | Enhancing the quality and increase software delivery speed through collaboration and automation. | Prioritizing maximum reliability of applications. |
| Focus Area | Building IDPs to help developers work more efficiently by providing self-service tools and workflows. | Shorten the duration between releases and improve quality through automation, collaboration, and practices like CI/CD. | Prioritize application stability and incident response (for example, through on-call duties and postmortems), and often oversees infrastructure to balance reliability with innovation (e.g., through error budgets). |
| Key Tools | Platform engineers leverage source code managers (GitLab), CI/CD systems (ArgoCD), and internal developer portals (Spotify’s Backstage) to build self-service platforms that automate software delivery and streamline developer workflows. | DevOps employs tools for building (Jenkins), testing (Selenium), containerizing (Docker), automating (Ansible), and monitoring (Prometheus) to enable collaborative and automated workflows between development and operations teams. | SRE tools include chaos engineering (Chaos Monkey), automated incident response (PagerDuty), monitoring (Datadog, observability (OpenTelemetry), infrastructure automation (Terraform), and service level objective (SLO) management frameworks (Terraform) to ensure system reliability. |
Evaluating the value of platform engineering
Platform engineering teams provide software engineering companies with real value by designing, building, and maintaining self-service internal platforms. For example, platform engineers boost developer productivity and fast-track software releases through abstraction techniques that streamline complex backend systems and tooling.
Organizations embracing platform engineering help enhance existing DevOps methodology by combining the cultural principles of DevOps, the reliability focus of SRE, and the developer experience orientation of platform engineering.
Ultimately, when all these disciplines work in concert together, the IDP reduces complexity. For example, SREs bring reliability practices; DevOps creates a collaborative mindset; and platform engineering delivers the internal developer platforms that make both approaches scalable.
Summary
It’s possible to work with diverse yet complementary disciplines to foster innovation, improve efficiency, and achieve better outcomes. As such, it’s not the case that platform engineering is a new buzzword, nor is it the new kid on the block primed to replace DevOps or SRE.
As platform engineering matures, we can expect increased specialization within teams. But for now, platform engineers will continue to focus on building internal platforms to improve tooling and workflows and enhance developer experiences. They will also continue to collaborate closely with SREs on reliability concerns.
Platform engineering isn’t a shiny new name for DevOps methodologies or SRE frameworks. It’s a distinct approach that enhances both by providing self-service platforms to streamline developer workflows, improve collaboration, and support reliability at scale.