Platform engineering is the process of building and maintaining internal platforms that optimize the software delivery lifecycle. Platform teams support the work of developers by implementing tools that make it easier to provision infrastructure, start new environments, and access observability data.
In this article, we’ll take a detailed look at the platform engineer role and its responsibilities. We’ll also share the skills you need to become part of a platform team, and then explain the ways in which platform engineering differs from regular DevOps.
What we will cover:
Platform engineering involves building internal toolchains to support software development teams. These tools are consolidated into a self-service internal developer platform (IDP) that developers can interact with to achieve their goals.
Creating platforms allows you to achieve key DevOps objectives. IDPs implement the DevOps philosophy, where tools and processes are imbued with automation, short feedback loops, and collaboration opportunities that increase development speed and quality. Providing devs with a unified place to perform tasks such as running tests and bringing up new environments improves consistency while eliminating complexity and keeping your DevOps flow running smoothly.
A platform engineer is a person who architects, builds, and maintains an internal developer platform (IDP) on behalf of developers. Platform engineers listen to developers to identify DevOps problems and create solutions. Strong communication, cooperation, and coordination skills are required to continually liaise with different groups of developers and agree on compromises.
Platform engineers usually have a DevOps background. Because IDPs implement DevOps workflows, a good understanding of key concepts, methodologies, and best practices is an important prerequisite. Platform engineers should be interested in topics including automation, observability, developer autonomy, and reproducible infrastructure; previous experience designing tools and processes that enable these will make it easier to transition into a platform-centric role.
Platform engineers should also feel comfortable working across different disciplines while paying close attention to finer details. They must be able to respond to frequent change, such as after new tools or best practices are released or when developers urgently require new capabilities within the platform.
Delivering a single internal developer platform feature could require engineers to integrate APIs, create infrastructure abstractions, and code a CLI or web interface for developers to utilize — all while continually appraising security and maintaining communication with development teams. They must also be confident working under pressure and capable of following their own lead.
Is a platform engineer the same as a software engineer?
A platform engineer and a software engineer have overlapping skills but different responsibilities within an organization. A software engineer primarily develops applications or systems, while a platform engineer builds and maintains the infrastructure and tools that support software development. Platform engineers enable software engineers to deploy, scale, and maintain their applications efficiently.
Platform engineers perform many different tasks to produce the most capable IDPs for developers to use. Their jobs span the entire DevOps sphere, from provisioning infrastructure to setting up efficient collaboration channels.
Some of the tasks that platform engineers perform each day include:
- Developing IDPs
- Setting up and optimizing CI/CD pipelines
- Creating new APIs, CLIs, web apps, and other interfaces for developers to interact with
- Managing testing workflows
- Monitoring of deployed environments to identify issues
- Writing documentation for the tools and platform components they create
- Cooperating with developers and operators to understand new requirements
These functions often require the combination of several different working techniques, such as writing custom code to create bespoke tools, or connecting existing APIs to integrate third-party services. Regular monitoring and iteration are also key parts of a platform engineer’s workload — continual maintenance is crucial to ensure IDPs remain relevant as developer and product requirements evolve.
Platform engineering isn’t just about the practical tasks of building and maintaining IDPs: It is a responsible role because platform engineers must keep the DevOps process running efficiently.
Here are the key expectations of platform teams:
- Automate the DevOps lifecycle: Platform engineers assemble the tools and processes that permit automation of development tasks within the DevOps lifecycle.
- Build bespoke internal tools: When an off-the-shelf tool cannot solve a problem, platform engineers create new APIs, CLIs, and apps, allowing developers to stay focused on product engineering.
- Provision and monitor infrastructure: Platform engineers implement the workflows that allow new infrastructure resources and development environments to be created on demand.
- Maintain and iterate upon IDPs: The platform team provides centralized IDPs that developers can use to achieve their aims. They maintain the platform as dev teams publish new requirements.
- Support teams using the platform: Platform engineers communicate with developers to encourage platform adoption, promote its capabilities, and solve any usability queries.
- Debug and resolve reported issues: Platform engineers will use observability suites to efficiently locate the causes of reported problems and then apply fixes before they significantly impact developer workflows.
- Assess the opportunities offered by new tools: Platform teams regularly review new tools that become available in the industry and assess how they could be integrated into the IDP. This facilitates continual platform improvement, in turn enabling iterative optimization of the DevOps delivery lifecycle.
Platform engineers also support the wider DevOps team by developing any other tool or process improvements required — especially when they can be integrated into the central IDP. As a platform engineer, you must expect your role to be highly dynamic, as it’ll be driven by developer and organization requirements.
Thinking of becoming a platform engineer? You’ll need a combination of technical ability and soft skills in order to succeed. The good news is you can acquire many of these skills naturally if you’ve already got experience as a developer or DevOps expert.
Platform engineering: education
The education for platform engineering typically involves a combination of formal education, practical experience, and ongoing learning.
- Formal education: The typical foundational requirement is a bachelor’s degree in computer science, software engineering, information technology, or a related field. This degree provides essential knowledge in programming, systems design, and software development principles.
A master’s degree or specialized certifications are not mandatory but can enhance career prospects. Examples include:
- Cloud certifications: AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Google Professional Cloud Architect, or Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert
- DevOps certifications: Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), Docker Certified Associate, or AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
- Security certifications: Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) or Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP)
Platform engineering: work experience
- Familiarity with development methods: It’s helpful to be familiar with the programming languages and techniques used by the development team so you can recognize where problems are likely to occur.
- Knowledge of CI/CD pipeline concepts and technologies: Experience creating and optimizing CI/CD pipelines allows you to automate actions optimally within an IDP.
- Experience of cloud-native operations: Platform engineering is relevant to all kinds of development work, but it’s often paired with cloud-native operating methods, including containers, serverless, and infrastructure as code (IaC). Understanding these technologies and appreciating how they can be utilized within IDPs are be beneficial.
Platform engineering: skills
- Interest in integrating different tools: Integration is a large part of a platform engineer’s work. You’ll be using APIs and SDKs to set up automated workflows and deliver the results to developers, so you’ll need to be aware of best practices for connecting tools together.
- Product-oriented mindset: An IDP is a product that’s maintained for the benefit of developers. It’s important to remember this as you iterate upon changes and design new capabilities based on developer requirements. You’ll also need good administrative skills to support the platform throughout its life.
- Ability to coordinate different teams and disciplines: Platform engineering demands strong communication skills and the ability to be diplomatic when faced with changing developer requests or disagreements between stakeholders. As a platform maintainer, you must be prepared to prioritize new features and coordinate how they’ll be implemented to satisfy the requirements of developers, operators, and security and compliance teams.
- Awareness of emerging trends and best practices: It’s useful to have a keen interest in the DevOps industry landscape. You should be motivated to continue your learning independently so you can promptly deliver new platform capabilities when developers request them.
The courses on the Platform Engineering community website are a good starting point to test your knowledge and learn any skills you’re missing. Shadowing other platform engineers in your organization can also be helpful for gaining first-hand experience in maintaining IDPs.
Does the platform engineer role require coding?
Coding skills are typically a fundamental part of the platform engineer role, which often involves writing code to automate tasks, manage infrastructure, and create tools that improve the development and deployment processes. Platform engineers should be proficient in various programming languages such as Python, Golang, Javascript, Typescript. They also need familiarity with scripting languages like Bash and PowerShell.
The salary range for a platform engineer in the United States falls between $120,000 and $150,000, depending on experience, location, and specific employer factors. The role of platform engineers is increasingly sought after due to the technical expertise required and the ongoing skills shortage in the field. Indeed reports over 24,000 platform engineering jobs currently available in the US.
It can be difficult to choose between platform engineering and a more traditional DevOps position because the roles share many similarities. But whereas DevOps specialists concentrate on establishing the organizational foundations that help development and operations teams collaborate, platform engineers use a product mentality to build IDPs that support developer productivity.
DevOps — key roles and responsibilities
- Design high-level processes to connect development and operations teams.
- Work across the entire software development lifecycle, from requirements planning through to production deployment.
- Introduce modern software development concepts and methodologies to facilitate cultural shift.
Platform engineering — key roles and responsibilities
- Maintain self-service internal platforms that solve specific problems for developers.
- Implement the processes and best practices identified by the broader DevOps team.
- Focus on optimizing the development phase of the delivery lifecycle.
These lists illustrate the main differences between DevOps and platform engineering. Check out Platform Engineering vs. DevOps – Key Differences to learn more.
The field you choose depends on whether you’d rather be making high-level cultural improvements or more targeted toolchain developments. If you’re still not sure, concentrate on gaining a sound knowledge of DevOps best practices first — you can always specialize in platform engineering later on.
Spacelift is a sophisticated CI/CD platform for your IaC tools including OpenTofu, Terraform, Terragrunt, CloudFormation, Pulumi, Kubernetes, and Ansible. With our solution, you can fully automate your IaC processes and set up safe self-service developer access — critical objectives for platform engineers.
Spacelift offers everything you need to create successful internal platforms. Your jobs run as isolated stacks that feature support for complex dependencies, configurable blueprint templates, and automated drift detection and remediation. Spacelift also offers a robust RBAC system and policy-based access control to prevent developers from applying unsafe actions to your resources.
Let’s explore how Spacelift can help.
1. Policies
With policies, you can control the kind of resources people can create and their parameters, build custom policies for third-party tools you integrate into your workflow, control the number of approvals you need for runs, and more:
In the example above, we are enforcing several mandatory tags for our resources (Name, env, and owner).
2. Stack dependencies
With stack dependencies, you can build dependencies between your configurations and even share outputs between them. There is no constraint on the number of dependencies you can create, and whenever a parent configuration finishes a run successfully, it will trigger runs to its children. As Spacelift supports multiple infrastructure tools, you can build dependencies between them, so a parent stack can use OpenTofu, for example, and a child stack can use Kubernetes.
3. Blueprints
Blueprints enable you to configure every aspect of your stack, including governance and compliance. They also allow you to create self-service infrastructure, which will boost your developer velocity considerably.
4. Cloud integrations
Static credentials are easily intercepted and can be used with malicious intent. Spacelift understands this, so it offers you the ability to integrate natively with AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud to generate dynamic credentials. Based on the roles you are using, these integrations can offer as few or as many permissions as you want:
5. Spaces
Spaces help you implement RBAC, and give partial admin rights to your users.
In the example above, if you give a user admin rights to the resources space only, they will have all permissions for the resources and production space, but they won’t be able to even view resources in other spaces.
6. Contexts
Contexts are logical containers that can be shared between multiple configurations and contain environment variables, mounted files, and lifecycle hooks, making it easier to ensure reusability and idempotency.
7. Drift detection and optional remediation
Infrastructure drift can be a really serious problem because if, for example, you fix something manually and then apply the code again later, you will reintroduce the bug into your configuration.
Spacelift offers a drift detection mechanism that runs a schedule that informs you about drift and can optionally remediate it:
8. Resources view
With Spacelift, you can see all the resources that have been deployed into your Spacelift account (based on the permissions you have), details about them, and their health:
Spacelift also offers other features that enable you to enhance your platform’s capabilities.
Platform engineers build and maintain IDPs that developers can use to work more efficiently. They’re responsible for implementing tools and processes such as on-demand infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and performant testing workflows that allow devs to stay focused on code authorship. This enables sustained improvements in software delivery throughput.
Becoming a platform engineer requires a robust DevOps background. You need to be familiar with popular tools and understand how they can be integrated to form a cohesive platform. Even when you’re skilled in your role, you must continually reassess the industry landscape to stay informed of new technologies that could refine your IDP. Commitment offers substantial rewards, however: Platform engineers can earn over 40% more than their DevOps counterparts and are in high demand, with 80% of software organizations expected to establish platform teams by 2026.
Want to learn more about Spacelift? Start your free Spacelift trial or book a demo with one of our engineers to set up self-service access to your infrastructure using leading IaC tools.
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Spacelift is an alternative to using homegrown solutions on top of a generic CI. It helps overcome common state management issues and adds several must-have capabilities for infrastructure management.
