What is platform engineering?

History and evolution of platform engineering Platform as a product Comparison with other traditional models (ticket ops vs. self-service) The benefits of platform engineering Problems it seeks to solve Benefits: Posted on November 19, 2025 by Natália Granato, CNCF Ambassador Platform engineering is a discipline focused on building and maintaining software development platforms that provide self-service for developer teams, offering the necessary infrastructure for provisioning an application, for example. The entire flow of development, testing, documentation, deployment, rollback, etc. , can happen through developer self-service. It emerged from the need to overcome the limitations of traditional software development, which was often characterized by slow cycles, isolated teams, silos, and complex infrastructures. The main goal of Platform Engineering is to improve the developer experience (DevEx) and optimize software delivery. In essence, platform engineering seeks to: Provide standardized tools and services: Create a set of tools, services, and workflows that developers can easily use to build, deploy, and manage their applications. These tools can include IDEs, CLIs, project templates, code versioning, CI/CD pipelines, container orchestration tools, configuration management tools, and observability systems. Reduce complexity: Abstract the complexity of the underlying infrastructure and operations, allowing developers to focus on code and business logic. The growing complexity of infrastructure, the cloud computing era with different providers and vendors, multi-cloud adoption, and the proliferation of tools and artifacts in the “everything as code” era led to an increase in developers’ cognitive load. The lack of design patterns also became a problem. Increase productivity: Accelerate the development and deployment cycle, eliminating bottlenecks and repetitive tasks.