platform engineering
also: IDP, internal developer platform
Platform engineering is the practice of designing and building internal developer platforms (IDPs) that provide self-service infrastructure, tools, and workflows to enable development teams to build, deploy, and operate applications efficiently.
Platform engineering treats infrastructure and operational tooling as a product, creating curated platforms that abstract away complexity and reduce cognitive load on developers. Rather than having each team manage their own infrastructure, a dedicated platform team builds standardized environments, deployment pipelines, and monitoring solutions that developers can self-serve.
A typical internal developer platform might include containerized application deployment, CI/CD pipelines, observability dashboards, secret management, and networking—all exposed through a simple web UI or CLI. For example, a developer might deploy a microservice by running platform deploy myapp --env production instead of manually configuring Kubernetes manifests, load balancers, and logging.
Platform engineering sits at the intersection of DevOps, site reliability engineering (SRE), and developer experience (DX), aiming to increase deployment velocity, reduce toil, and standardize best practices across an organization.