As companies embrace cloud-native application development at scale, platform engineering is emerging as a pivotal discipline to support fast-moving development teams while maintaining essential control over infrastructure, operations and security.
Rather than replacing DevOps, platform engineering offers a structured foundation that helps organizations standardize internal tooling, reduce complexity and deliver consistent, scalable developer experiences.
“Platform engineering is becoming essential for modern DevOps because it brings structure to the chaos,” says Kiran Madhunapantula, COO of product and platform engineering at Xebia. “As organizations scale, teams need consistent, secure and repeatable ways to build and ship software without getting bogged down in red tape.”
The role of platform engineering has grown in importance as enterprises have expanded their digital footprints and increasingly rely on distributed teams and microservices.
Internal platforms are often deprioritized in favor of customer-facing development, but Madhunapantula argues that these platforms form the backbone of delivery excellence.
“If developers are stuck navigating fragmented tools, ticket queues or unclear workflows, velocity suffers no matter how advanced the external platform might be,” he says.
This mismatch between development velocity and operational scalability has plagued DevOps practices for years.
Pavlo Baron, co-founder and CEO of Platform Engineering Labs, says the fundamental misunderstanding of what truly bridges dev and ops has long been misattributed to “culture.”
“For almost a decade, culture has been blamed for everything that didn’t work in the world between devs and ops. Now we know it better,” Baron says. “It’s not about culture; it’s about allowing engineers with different preferences and experiences to make their contribution with what they’re good at.”
That separation of concerns is where platform engineering plays a defining role. Ops engineers can now create reusable, reliable services that developers can consume from a catalog — without having to rebuild or reconfigure each time.
“Platform engineering lets them solve these hard problems once and provide the solution to other engineers so that they don’t have to solve it,” Baron says.
The result is more than just better collaboration — it’s structural efficiency.
“A strong internal platform doesn’t just speed things up,” Madhunapantula says. “It reduces cognitive load, encourages best practices, and creates a developer experience that retains top talent.”
Golden Pathways are a major part of that experience. These are curated, well-supported paths that guide developers toward best practices while preserving autonomy and flexibility.
“It’s not about locking developers into rigid processes, but giving them smart defaults, self-service capabilities and the right level of autonomy within well-defined boundaries,” Madhunapantula says.
The key to building these Golden Pathways lies in simplicity and intentional design.
“The ideal path leads through the least resistance and friction,” Baron says. “These can only be achieved by minimizing the number of tools involved, reducing the level of visible detail and minimizing the knowledge expected and required to do the job. Focus is king, simplicity is queen.”
By abstracting away platform complexity, organizations can reduce the cognitive overload that has increasingly burdened developers, especially in tool-heavy DevOps ecosystems.
“If the platform team has done its job right, developers don’t need to use any of the platform team’s own tools,” Baron says. “Neither do developers need to understand any of the inner workings of the platform or the services it provides.”
That promise, however, often falls short in practice.
“Toolchains and the majority of tools in question are so diverse and fundamentally hostile towards their users that it’s impossible to abstract them away,” Baron explains. “The result can be a total mess, with generations of attempts to improve the situation by layering more and more tools that are supposed to provide relief but instead keep worsening it exponentially for everybody.”
For Derek Ashmore, AI enablement principal at Asperitas, platform engineering offers a more sustainable and scalable future.
“The best internal platforms abstract away the complexity of infrastructure provisioning, CI/CD, and compliance requirements,” he says. “This frees up development teams to focus on delivering features that matter to the business.”
Ashmore emphasizes that success in platform engineering isn’t about building from scratch — it’s about choosing and assembling the right tools for the organization’s needs.
“A common pitfall is building too much internally,” he says. “It’s smarter to leverage mature open-source or commercial tools when they exist and only build in-house where you truly need differentiation.”
The impact of platform engineering also extends beyond developer efficiency. According to Baron, it reshapes how infrastructure, SRE, and DevOps teams operate.
“Platform engineering gives them the foundation to excel in what they are already good at, but also to structure their work around reusable abstractions and services,” he says. “That brings ops engineers back from reactive ad hocness into plannable engineering work.”
This reorientation adds clarity and purpose to operations teams that often deal only with break-fix scenarios.
“It brings the feeling of purpose — the daily routine in the ops space can be dire, because you mostly have to deal with broken stuff,” Baron says. “Platform engineering doesn’t magically make ops pain go away, but it brings relief in the form of purpose and structure.”
Despite its transformative potential, implementing platform engineering successfully does not require a complete cultural overhaul.
“It’s exclusively about organization of work and sorting responsibilities, while letting every engineer do what they are personally best at,” Baron says. “Cultural shifts don’t happen—a company cannot change its DNA. The expectation of a massive cultural shift is what made DevOps so brittle.”
That said, implementation still requires careful coordination across business units. Internal developer portals are often seen as a quick fix, but Baron cautions against overreliance on surface-level tools.
“This is not solved by just pulling over an internal developer portal,” he says. “The work needs to be properly structured among the business units.”
Ultimately, platform engineering enables speed, scale, and security — without compromising developer freedom.
“When that balance is struck, teams can move faster with more confidence, and companies can scale without sacrificing quality or creativity,” Madhunapantula says.