A fully mature platform fades into the background and lets developers build without thinking about pipelines or permissions. Self-service, compliance, and security become automatic, turning the platform into an engine for delivery speed.
At this stage, developers don’t need to worry about infrastructure details: They request a service with a few high-level parameters and are done.
While there are still lots of duct tape and ongoing changes on the right side of the cycle, and it is illusory to think this will go away anytime soon through full automation, that doesn’t slow down developers and delivery anymore.
Pavlo Baron, co-founder and CEO, Platform Engineering Labs, says to get there, abstractions are needed.
“In the infrastructure space, when developers must provide how big in gigabytes the database will be, that slows them down, and is a recipe for failure,” he says. “When they only provide a t-shirt size, a lot of technical detail can be hiding behind XL that won’t bother developers.”
Abstraction allows both sides of the cycle to move at the required speed while maintaining a reliable, meaningful and minimalistic interface.
“Complexity and inadequate tooling are what prevent platforms from fading into the background,” Baron says. “While everything in the Dev world is shiny-ish, in the Ops territory, everything is duct tape covered in sand.”
Dmitry Chuyko, performance architect at BellSoft, says the roadblock he’s seen most often is trying to unify legacy systems without a clear migration path.
“You’ve got teams on different tech stacks, different cloud providers, different CI/CD tools,” he explains. “The temptation is to build a platform that accommodates everyone. Don’t.”
His solution: Pick your standards, provide clear migration paths, and accept that some edge cases will take longer.
“Inconsistent workflows kill platforms because they destroy trust,” Chuyko adds.
When “deploying to staging” works differently from “deploying to production”, or when Team A’s pipeline looks nothing like Team B’s, developers can’t build mental models.
“They’re constantly context-switching, and that’s exhausting,” he says.
Balancing Abstraction, Transparency
Chuyko says most platforms fail by either abstracting too much or too little.
“Small teams of five people handle this naturally,” he says. “Everyone knows the tradeoffs, and adjustments happen organically.”
But in organizations with more than 100 engineers, you need explicit frameworks and continuous feedback loops.
Chuyko suggests starting with “Golden Paths”, opinionated but well-documented ways to accomplish common tasks.
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“Developers get to production in hours, not days, and all the guardrails are built in,” he says.
But the key to remember is that these Golden Paths aren’t prison walls–you need escape hatches for legitimate exceptions.
“Document them, measure how often they’re used, and when you see patterns, either improve the Golden Path or accept that you need a second path,” Chuyko says.
Transparency comes from treating the platform like a product, which requires maintaining a public roadmap.
“Hold regular office hours. Show developers exactly what’s happening under the hood when they push code,” Chuyko says. “When they understand the system, they trust it. When they trust it, they stop fighting it.”
For large organizations, this requires dedicated roles. People who investigate team needs, curate tools, and maintain that feedback loop.
“You can’t scale platform engineering on goodwill and Slack messages,” Chuyko says.
Achieving Platform Maturity
Baron says a platform is not mature when developers need to understand low-level infrastructure details because these are exposed to them through the platform team.
“One of the main jobs of the platform team is to hide unnecessary detail, so that developers can move fast without caring too much about how and where their applications will be running,” he explains. “Not having this is a clear sign of platform immaturity.”
Chuyko says the clearest sign isn’t ticket volume, it’s ticket quality: If you’re getting tickets about data corruption, missing critical features that exist in competing solutions, or “why can’t I do this obvious thing?”, your platform isn’t mature.
“Shadow tooling is the canary in the coal mine,” he says. “When teams build workarounds or bypass your platform entirely, they’re telling you it doesn’t meet their needs. Listen to that signal.”
However, from Chuyko’s perspective, the most telling sign is to ask developers if they’d recommend the platform to their colleagues.
“If you don’t have enthusiastic adoption, you don’t have maturity,” he says.