Platform engineering after the DevOps wave: what changes for IT leadership
How the internal developer platform idea transforms the role of IT in a company and why this is a strategic question, not just an operational one.
2023 became the year when the term "platform engineering" moved from niche to mainstream. Gartner included it in its list of key trends, major companies started forming dedicated platform teams, specialised tools and communities appeared. It is worth understanding what this represents and why it matters beyond the CTO's office.
Where this grew from
DevOps as an approach solved an important problem: it removed the barrier between development and operations. Teams started deploying their own services, owning them in production, thinking about operational characteristics.
But as scale grew, a different problem emerged. Each development team spends a significant portion of its time not on business logic, but on infrastructure tasks: setting up CI/CD, managing configurations, working with cloud resources, logging, monitoring. This is work reproduced dozens of times across teams with small variations.
Platform engineering is the answer to this. A dedicated team takes responsibility for creating and maintaining a "golden path" for developers: a set of ready-made templates, tools, and processes that makes it possible to create a new service and bring it to production quickly and predictably.
How this differs from classic IT infrastructure
The key word is "product". A platform team builds an internal product for internal customers (development teams). This means the same principles applied to external products apply to the platform: user orientation, iterative development, feedback collection, satisfaction measurement.
This is a fundamental difference from the traditional "IT as a service department" approach, where standards are handed down from above and developers are expected to follow them. Platform engineering is "infrastructure as a product" - something people want to use.
If developers work around the platform and build their own solutions - that is a signal that the platform does not solve real needs. Not bad developers, but a bad product.
Why this changes the IT budget conversation
A platform team is an investment in the productivity of all development, not an operational cost of a specific service. This means a different logic for budget justification.
If the platform team reduces the time from "feature idea" to "feature in production" by 30% - that can be translated into money. If it reduces the number of infrastructure incidents - that is also measurable. If it lowers the cost of onboarding new developers - that shows up in the hiring budget.
Platform engineering lends itself well to business-metric justification, not just technical indicators.
Signs that this is relevant for your company
- Several development teams, each with their own infrastructure practices.
- Recurring complaints about time spent on infrastructure rather than business tasks.
- Difficulties onboarding new developers.
- Trouble maintaining consistent security standards and operational controls.
- Growing number of services with not enough time to maintain them.
If these patterns are familiar - the platform engineering conversation is worth starting. Not as a technical project, but as an investment in development operational efficiency.
A simple check question
Take a new developer and ask them to create, test, and deploy a simple service from scratch - how long will it take and how many instructions from different places will they need to find?
If the answer is "several days and many places" - that is the problem platform engineering solves.