As enterprises grapple with aging IT systems and a seemingly ever-accelerating pace of innovation, platform engineering has emerged as a central force in the modernization of application infrastructure.
By creating scalable internal developer platforms (IDPs) and automating infrastructure provisioning, platform teams are enabling organizations to modernize legacy systems while accelerating the shift toward cloud-native, microservices-based architectures.
At the heart of this movement is the growing need to standardize and simplify the development experience across increasingly fragmented environments.
“Platform teams enable continuous application modernization by unifying tools, environments and workflows, for new and legacy systems alike,” said Joe Duffy, co-founder and CEO of Pulumi.
Internal developer platforms sit above the organization’s infrastructure and give teams a repeatable system for delivery and a path for incremental migration of legacy workloads.
This incremental approach is key for large organizations weighed down by monolithic architectures: Instead of overhauling everything at once, platform engineering enables teams to tackle modernization piece by piece.
“Most teams aren’t going to move everything at once. They’re going to modernize piece by piece,” Duffy said. “IDPs give them the scaffolding to do that safely and repeatably.”
A well-architected internal developer platform becomes a central hub for developer productivity, consolidating tooling and workflows to reduce friction and eliminate manual effort.
According to Duffy, the core components of an effective IDP include infrastructure templates, environment management, workflow orchestration, observability and security guardrails.
“When done right, an IDP eliminates cognitive load, reduces manual work, and creates consistency across teams, allowing developers to focus on building features, not filing tickets or fighting with cloud infrastructure,” he explained.
In cloud-native environments, however, automating infrastructure provisioning presents unique challenges. Flexibility and scalability must be balanced with governance and control.
“One of the most common challenges is maintaining consistency while scaling across teams,” Duffy noted. “You want infrastructure to be flexible enough for teams to move fast but standardized enough to enforce compliance and cost controls.”
Platform engineering also plays a pivotal role in bridging the gap between infrastructure and application teams.
By integrating provisioning tightly with CI/CD pipelines and security policies, IDPs foster end-to-end automation that spans the entire software lifecycle.
“Without this, automation often breaks down between development, infrastructure and security,” Duffy said. “This is where infrastructure as code is essential, particularly when done in familiar programming languages.”
The transition to microservices and API-driven architectures—a hallmark of modern software delivery—can be especially daunting for organizations with extensive legacy systems.
Platform engineering helps mitigate that complexity by offering opinionated defaults, reusable patterns and automation that reduce the burden on individual teams.
“Whether spinning up a new containerized service, exposing a clean API, or migrating part of a monolith into Kubernetes, the platform ensures developers can stay focused on solving business problems, not messing with cloud infrastructure,” Duffy said.
Beyond productivity and modernization, platform engineering is deeply tied to the evolution of DevOps.
While DevOps laid the groundwork with principles like automation and shared ownership, platform engineering carries those ideas further by embedding them directly into the development process.
“Platform engineering builds on these foundations,” Duffy said. “By codifying infrastructure standards and guardrails into an IDP, platform teams make things like security, scalability and reliability part of the day-to-day developer experience.”
As software delivery speed becomes a more critical competitive differentiator, platform engineering quietly underpins the transformation efforts of digital-first enterprises. By turning infrastructure into reusable code and platforms into self-service ecosystems, organizations can move faster while staying secure and compliant.
“It’s how organizations turn the cloud into a competitive advantage that turbocharges the business with outsized results,” Duffy said.