Platform engineering is the discipline of designing and building self-service internal developer platforms that abstract away infrastructure complexity and accelerate software delivery.
Platform engineers build and maintain internal developer platforms (IDPs) that abstract infrastructure complexity. Instead of every development team learning Terraform, Kubernetes, and CI/CD from scratch, they interact with a curated platform that provides self-service capabilities.
DevOps is a cultural movement focused on collaboration between development and operations. Platform engineering is the discipline of building the tools and platforms that make DevOps practices scalable across an organization.
A small startup might practice DevOps without a dedicated platform team. As organizations grow, platform engineering becomes essential to avoid every team reinventing the same infrastructure patterns.
Effective platforms are measured by developer satisfaction, time-to-first-deployment for new services, and reduction in infrastructure-related support tickets. The best platforms feel invisible—developers focus on their applications while the platform handles the rest.
The companion to 'Terraform the Hard Way.' Same twenty-one crossroads, framed against what each one looks like under a framework that's already made the decisions. With concrete Atmos snippets at every step.
A guided checklist of every decision you'll make on the road from `terraform apply` to production. Not a recommendation — an education. Borrowed in spirit from Kelsey Hightower's 'Kubernetes the Hard Way.'
An internal developer platform is the icing on the cake — the reward for getting the foundation underneath into shape. Here's what I've learned about when the icing actually delivers, and why a framework matters more than the portal.
There's an anxiety running through services businesses about AI. They have it backwards. When the busywork disappears, what's left is the part that actually matters.
AI is expanding the possibility space faster than we can build. Traditional metrics can't capture what's happening. Here's a new way to think about it.