Platform engineering became the term everyone used in 2022, though the work itself has been around in mature organisations for years. What matters is the naming. When we name something, we hire for it, we build org structures around it, and we invest in it differently.
The problem it addresses
At small scale, each developer can configure their own development environment, deployment pipeline, and infrastructure. As organisations grow, this becomes unsustainable: inconsistent environments, repeated setup work, security configuration drift, and the cognitive burden of understanding 15 different CI/CD configurations. Platform engineering builds the internal tools that make developers productive without requiring each team to solve the same infrastructure problems.
The golden path concept
The golden path is the pre-approved, pre-configured way to build, test, and deploy a new service. A platform team defines the golden path: what CI/CD template to use, what container base image to start from, what monitoring configuration to apply, how to register the service in the catalog. Developers who follow the golden path get a working service fast. Developers who deviate take on the burden of configuring the components themselves.
Team Topologies and platform teams
The Team Topologies model (Skelton and Pais, 2019) provides a framework for thinking about platform teams. In the model, a platform team provides a self-service platform that enables stream-aligned teams (feature development teams) to deliver without depending on specialists for infrastructure tasks. The platform team's goal is reducing cognitive load on feature teams, not controlling them.
What to automate first
The highest ROI platform automation targets are: new service bootstrapping (project setup, repository creation, CI/CD wiring), environment provisioning (dev, staging, production environments on demand), and on-call runbook automation (common operational tasks that on-call engineers execute manually). These are the tasks where the time cost of manual execution across many teams justifies the investment in automation.