The Operational Challenges of Microservices
To design a good solution, it is important to first understand the built-in challenges of the architecture. Architectural patterns offer different ways to structure an application. While a monolith is built as a single, unified unit, a microservices architecture is a distributed system made of small, independent services. While this modular setup allows for independent development and deployment, it also creates new operational hurdles.
Developers must deal with service discovery, network configurations, security, and data management. Without a standard approach, this leads to inconsistent environments and duplicated work. Ultimately, this undermines the speed and agility the architecture was meant to provide.
Platform Engineering as a Practical Way to do DevOps
You can see Platform Engineering as a practical and scalable way to implement DevOps principles. DevOps establishes the essential culture of shared ownership and collaboration, breaking down the traditional silos between development and operations. However, this cultural shift requires a technical foundation to truly flourish. Platform Engineering provides this by creating an Internal Developer Platform, which embeds operational best practices and automation directly into the developer workflow, making the DevOps philosophy a practical reality.
The platform engineering discipline focuses on designing, building, and maintaining an IDP, which is treated as an internal product, with the organization’s developers as its end-users. The goal is to provide a self-service layer that automates and standardizes complex workflows. This allows developers to work with more autonomy & efficiency and ultimately deliver business value faster.
Core Components of an Internal Developer Platform
1. A Simple Layer over Orchestration
A platform’s foundation should support various application runtimes, not just containers. This includes traditional monoliths, applications running on virtual machines, and even integrations with third-party SaaS products. In the current job market, it is a major challenge to attract developers who possess the full breadth of this specialized knowledge from Kubernetes and cloud APIs to specific SaaS configurations. A successful platform hides this underlying complexity. It provides a unified, simplified interface for application deployment and management, so developers can work efficiently without needing to understand the deep mechanics of every system.
2. Standardized CI/CD Workflows
A key concept in Platform Engineering is creating “golden paths.” These are established, supported, and well-documented workflows for common tasks, especially CI/CD. Instead of each team building its own pipeline, the platform provides a standard template. This template includes security scans, automated tests, and compliance checks by default, which ensures consistency and quality while speeding up the deployment process.
3. Service Mesh for Communication Between Services
As the number of services grows, the network of interactions becomes complex to manage and debug. A service mesh (like Istio or Linkerd) provides a transparent infrastructure layer to handle this. It offers critical features like advanced traffic management, zero-trust security through mTLS encryption, and detailed observability of the traffic between services.
4. Centralized Observability
In a distributed system, troubleshooting requires a complete picture. Effective observability is built on three pillars: Logs, Metrics, and Traces. A mature IDP centralizes this data and, where possible, automatically connects it. This gives developers a unified view of the system’s health and reduces the time it takes to solve problems (MTTR).
The Platform as an Internal Product
The technical setup is only one part of the equation. A successful platform requires a strategic mindset. It is crucial to treat the platform not as a one-time project, but as a long-term product with a lifecycle and roadmap driven by the needs of its users.
This requires a dedicated platform team that actively talks with development teams to understand their workflows and pain points. Feature prioritization should be based on what delivers the most value to the developer experience (DevEx). The recommended approach is to start small, address the biggest points of friction, and improve iteratively based on feedback.
Furthermore, a “golden path” should not be too restrictive. While the platform provides an efficient, standard route, there must be a clear process for teams with special needs to deviate. The trade-off should be clear: the platform team supports the golden path. If a team diverges, it must take on a larger share of the operational responsibility.
Tools in the industry
In platform engineering, several key tools are frequently used to build an effective Internal Developer Platform. Kubernetes often provides the foundation, serving as the de facto standard for robust container orchestration and managing application runtimes. To create a unified developer experience, Backstage is a popular choice for building self-service portals that feature service catalogs and software templates. For automating continuous delivery, a GitOps tool like Argo CD is widely adopted to synchronize and deploy applications directly from a Git repository.
Conclusion
Platform engineering offers opportunities for agility but also brings operational complexity. Platform Engineering, executed with a product mindset, is a strategic and technical answer to these challenges. By building an Internal Developer Platform, an organization can hide complexity, standardize best practices, and reduce the cognitive load on its developers. This empowers them to focus on their primary goal: innovating and building core business logic. The investment in a solid platform foundation pays off in the form of increased development velocity, improved system reliability, and a more sustainable engineering ecosystem.
