Devs today in a typical software development role often spend a significant amount of time on the following depending on the size of the team:
Coding and development
Debugging and troubleshooting
Testing
Code Reviews
Documentation
Research, Learning and skill development
Deployment and DevOps
However engineers at scaling organizations face many challenges along with their growing infrastructure and have to master many tools and products, to get their applications operational such as:
Automation
Autoscaling
Service Discovery
Observability
Security and auditing
CI/CD
SAST, DAST
Chaos Engineering
Resource utilization and cost optimization
By providing a platform with common tools and capabilities, cognitive load on development teams can be reduced and therefore increasing developer productivity.
But, what is platform engineering?
Platform engineering refers to the practice of building and maintaining the foundational infrastructure and tools that enable the development, deployment, and operation of software applications. It aims to improve developer experience and productivity by providing self-service capabilities that enhance efficiency, scalability, reliability, and security throughout the software development lifecycle.
Although the capabilities of building a developer platform depend entirely on the needs of the organization and its users, features such as consistency and efficiency enhance user experience. By providing golden pathways, teams can choose from a pre-approved selection of tools to help them get operational without having to worry about cloud infrastructure (eliminate writing IaC), setting up deployment pipelines(no more messing around with complex YAML files), orchestration of product releases (automate CI/CD), securing the environment (incorporate DevSecOps), access control (setting up SSO and RBAC), etc.
A misconception is that platform engineering is something that only makes sense in large teams. I would say platform teams are instrumental in paving the road to a consistent self-service whether big or small (not too small though). Hence many orgs are resorting to building tools that streamline dev & ops.
TL;DR ~ If you are building an organization that is set to scale rapidly, it is time to think about embracing platform engineering and ease developer toil.