Why Your Enterprise Needs Platform Engineering

Before discussing why you need platform engineering, let’s explain what it is: Platform engineering focuses on building and maintaining your organization’s platform — the infrastructure, tools, and services that enable developers to manage applications efficiently. Think of platform engineering as a bridge between development and operations that provides self-service capabilities to empower teams.

To enable platform engineering for your organization, you need to build a platform engineering team.

There is no single way to enable platform engineering, but here are steps you can follow to ensure stability and reduce resistance to change:

1. Identify what doesn’t work — Talk to your software engineers to understand their pain points and frustrations with the current process.
2. Start small — Don’t make all the changes at once. Based on the feedback you receive from your software engineers, decide on the most important point and start working towards it. Implementing multiple changes simultaneously will only increase frustration and ambiguity.
3. Measure your change’s outcome — Track improvements in areas including developer satisfaction, deployment frequency, reduced misconfigurations, and downtime.
4. Iterate and repeat — Use the feedback and the measurements you’ve taken to refine changes, and then move on to the next change

Now that we have an idea of platform engineering and how to get started with it, let’s explore the speed-control paradox:

To be successful, organizations need to respond quickly to market demands while maintaining control over key areas such as security, compliance, and costs. The more you scale, the more pronounced this paradox becomes, bringing its own set of challenges.

Without a strategic approach, organizations encounter one of the following problems:

1. Too much speed, not enough control: You move fast, but with the hidden cost of technical debt, security vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, downtime risk, and compliance issues.
2. Too much control, not enough speed: If you implement too much control, excessive governance processes will slow innovation, making it hard to attract new customers or retain existing ones, making your organization uncompetitive.

Spacelift commissioned The Infrastructure Automation Report, 2025, to help organizations identify where they rank compared with other companies in their space and learn how to solve the speed-control paradox (spoiler: it relies on platform engineering.).

To meet the growing demands for speed, standardization, scalability, governance, and cost efficiency, enterprises must embrace platform engineering as the foundation for sustainable software delivery.

Improve developer velocity

Developer velocity measures the efficiency and speed of software development teams in delivering high-quality software and solutions. Research shows that developers spend less than 50% of their time coding, and the rest of the time is spent in meetings, infrastructure setup, environment configuration, and understanding complex deployment processes.

Platform engineering overcomes some of these issues by providing:

• Self-service for infrastructure. By leveraging an infrastructure orchestration platform, platform engineers can make developers’ lives easier. Developers can fill in a simple form to get the infrastructure they need for testing their application deployed automatically. 
• Automate repetitive tasks. By automating, platform engineers reduce the friction and discussions between them and developers.
• Standardized environments. By standardizing environments, developers will know that if something works in the development environment, it is likely to work in a superior environment. 
• Ephemeral environments. By using ephemeral environments for testing purposes, developers won’t have to worry about turning off the infrastructure as soon as they have completed a task.
• Reduce context-switching. Developers won’t need to learn new technologies and constantly switch from their IDEs to several platforms to achieve simple tasks.

Developers should focus on creating business value rather than working with infrastructure on a daily basis, and platform engineering is key to enabling that.

Enable standardization

Inconsistent environments, ad-hoc automation, and fragmented tooling make enterprises struggle and lose focus. A well-designed platform will enforce best practices and enable teams to innovate without being afraid that their code might cause issues.

Platform engineering enables this standardization by providing templates and built-in compliance mechanisms that reduce the risks associated with configuration drift, ensure faster onboarding, and help you build predictable environments.

Improve scaling

As your company grows, your issues grow as well, so it is very important to keep things in check. To make scaling easier, platform engineers prioritize speed, but they ensure that governance is built into the foundation of your enterprise’s systems to minimize issues. 

Developing with scale in mind is achieved by:

• Implementing infrastructure as code (IaC) to allow idempotent deployments across your organization’s environments
• Establishing governance mechanisms that we will explore further on
• Automating capacity planning and resource allocation
• Taking advantage of infrastructure orchestration platforms, or at least using generic CI/CDs

When these operations are in place, scaling becomes a natural extension of your day-to-day operations.

Enhance governance

Governance has traditionally included manual approvals and lengthy review processes. Platform engineering embeds governance into the platform itself.

By leveraging platform engineering, you enhance governance with:

• Role-based access control based on the least privilege principle
• Automated compliance checks
• Policy as code
• Drift detection and remediation
• Audit trails
• Monitoring

Embedding all of the above means governance happens continuously and does not create bottlenecks in your delivery processes.

Boost cost management

Platform engineering provides significant cost savings that go far beyond infrastructure savings. By using platform engineering, you get unparalleled visibility and control over spending:

• Using policy as code in conjunction with automated cost estimations, you can easily build guardrails around your budget.
• Standardizing prevents orphaned resources.
• You can scale up or down based on usage.

Platform engineering changes cost management from a reactive finance process to a proactive engineering discipline. This not only lowers your spending, but more importantly, it shows you a better alignment between technology investments and business values.

Spacelift enables you to implement all the benefits of platform engineering:

• Improves developer velocity
  • You can easily self-serve infrastructure using Blueprints and our K8s operator. 
  • We are also integrating with ServiceNow to meet your developers where they are in their processes.
• Enable standardization
  • Our use of policy as code can restrict certain resources or resource parameters, require multiple approvals for runs, control what happens when a PR is open or merged, and control where to send notifications.
  • Contexts ensure that you can reuse environment variables, mounted files, and lifecycle hooks.
  • Self-service can also improve your standardization.

• Improve scaling

• • Easily build dependencies between your stacks with shareable outputs by using stack dependencies.
  • Leverage drift detection and remediation to scale safely.
  • Use spaces for RBAC.
  • Resources view and configuration management view give you insights into all of your IaC and Ansible resources.

• Enhance governance

• • Spacelift’s Policy Library allows you to easily import policies to help you improve your governance
  • Audit trails help you understand what happened and why.

• Boost cost management

• • Easily combine policy as code with our Infracost integration.

Combining these will help you master the speed-control paradox, enabling you to release faster while staying in control.If you want to learn more about how Spacelift can help, check out this article.

To keep your enterprise efficient, you need to implement platform engineering. Improving developer velocity while staying in control of issues and costs is paramount for business success. You can achieve this with a platform engineering team that streamlines your processes.

To see how easy it is to implement platform engineering, open a free account with Spacelift.