Platform Engineering is a socio-technical discipline aimed at building foundational software platforms and associated ecosystems that are geared around accelerating, empowering and creating efficiencies for modern software delivery teams.

A key outcome of a platform engineering initiative is often an internal developer platform (IDP). This is best described as a collection of curated self-service tools, workflows and services made available to various internal development teams. Through abstractions, simplified interfaces and tailored paths, IDPs take on the heavy lifting tasks and free-up developers to focus on building, deploying and ultimately delivering business value to end users. CI/CD, Gitops and Infrastructure-as-code all form part of a one-stop self-service platform.

There are several benefits that platform engineering (or IDPs) can bring to a business:

• Increased developer productivity and efficiency: through tooling, automation and infrastructure-as-code your development teams will be able to focus on delivery meaning you will able to build new features or go-to-market faster

• Business Innovation: through the pragmatic use of standards, providing consistency and confidence to developers and management alike your business will be able to increase in innovation

• Sustainable Scalability: an IDP built well will enable organisations sustainably scale teams to meet increased business demands and in turn increase profits and decrease costs