Platform engineering

Build scalable and reusable platforms to enable faster, efficient, and secure software development.

Platform engineering: Scale DevOps with automation and collaboration

Platform engineering extends and refines traditional DevOps practices to help enterprises grow securely and efficiently. It emphasizes an automated, self-service approach that simplifies operations for developers, while preserving compliance and stability.

The following image illustrates how developers, platform engineers, and operations teams collaborate in a continuous cycle. Developers seek innovation and speed, platform engineers build and refine the platform’s services and templates, and operations teams maintain the stability and compliance that modern production environments demand.

Platform engineering_above_he_fold_graphic

The continuous cycle of development, platform engineering, and operations

What is platform engineering?

Platform engineering is the latest evolution in how organizations build and operate technology platforms. It encourages teams to develop internal platforms with a product-focused mindset, where the internal developer platform (IDP) serves as a product that meets developers’ needs. Instead of expecting developers to navigate raw infrastructure on their own, Platform engineering incorporates continuous feedback, clear interfaces, and robust automation.

Platform engineering also emphasizes building capabilities that add value for development teams. By maintaining regular communication with developers, platform engineers prioritize and deliver features that simplify coding, testing, and deployment. This approach not only saves time, but also streamlines processes across different environments.

The hidden complexity behind self-service

A central tenet of platform engineering is self-service. While a self-service portal or developer catalog might be the most visible surface, the intricate automation underneath is the true linchpin. When a developer requests a new service, the platform triggers tasks such as provisioning namespaces and virtual machines, setting up Git repositories, creating databases, configuring authentication, and establishing security controls.

These automated workflows transform the developer experience. Instead of juggling multiple tools and settings, teams gain immediate access to pre-approved infrastructure that remains consistent, secure, and compliant. This complexity is abstracted from developers, allowing them to focus on delivering features rather than wrangling environments.

The benefits of platform engineering

Streamlined processes

Organizations often see significant complexity and overhead when each team chooses different tools and processes. These inconsistencies lead to complex infrastructures, fragmented collaboration, and higher security risks. Platform engineering addresses these challenges by providing a unified model for technology adoption.

Improved productivity

By creating a product-like internal platform, you reduce the cognitive load for engineering teams. This environment improves onboarding for new team members, lowers maintenance costs, and aligns security and compliance measures across every team. Over time, these benefits translate into faster innovation, less downtime, and better synergy between development and operations teams.

The power of internal developer platforms

An internal developer platform is the single pane of glass for engineering teams to seamlessly access the platform. It unifies code, infrastructure, and deployment in one place, making it easier for developers to collaborate:

IDPs offer self-service and automated provisioning, which remove bottlenecks when teams need new environments or resources.
By managing infrastructure through a consistent interface, you ensure that standards and best practices, such as security guardrails, quotas, and monitoring, remain enforced.
This consistency extends across hybrid environments, public clouds, and on-premise systems. As a result, platform teams can focus on improving the developer experience and enabling faster delivery cycles.

Download Developer Portals: Prepare to Perform with Red Hat Developer Hub to explore how engineering teams can use unified platforms to enhance development efficiency.

Scaling DevOps across the organization

Platform engineering helps enterprises scale DevOps initiatives while safeguarding security, compliance, and performance. By treating internal platforms as products, platform engineers can iterate based on developer feedback, automate tedious tasks, and turn infrastructure into a strategic advantage. This focus on automation, self-service, and continuous collaboration is at the core of modern software development at scale.

Platform engineering shifts traditional infrastructure management toward a product-driven discipline that prioritizes developer needs and efficient automation. This shift lowers cognitive load, centralizes security and compliance, and speeds up innovation. An internal developer platform plays a pivotal role by providing unified, self-service access to infrastructure and services. Embracing platform engineering enables your organization to deliver software more effectively and adapt to evolving market demands.

Key elements of platform engineering

Clear, measurable goals

Before creating a platform, define goals with the stakeholders. Goals could be improving developer productivity, speeding up release processes, reducing cost, and improving software security. These goals should be measurable.

Product focus

Platform engineers should treat their platforms as products. Development teams could be considered as primary stakeholders and goals defined during the discovery phase should be met with the platforms.

Automation and standardization

Identifying and automating common use cases and functionalities is crucial for making software templates and the platform itself more widely adopted.

Drive continuous improvement

Once platform features like templates and automation scripts are rolled out, developers become the primary testers. Their feedback is crucial for ongoing refinement and improvement. By providing clear and actionable feedback, developers empower the platform team to continuously optimize the tools and resources they offer, ensuring the platform remains relevant and effective.

Promote code consistency

Developers can directly contribute to the platform by creating reusable components including well-tested functions, libraries, or code modules that address common development tasks. Sharing these components with the platform team makes them available to other developers, promoting code reuse and consistency across projects.

Equip teams with knowledge and best practices

The knowledge of experienced developers is mostly undocumented treasure. By documenting best practices and coding standards, developers can help embed these practices into the platform itself.

Example use cases

Provision virtual machines with Red Hat Developer Hub

Developer Hub app dev learning path featured image

Get started with Red Hat Developer Hub software templates

Get started with Red Hat Developer Hub software catalog

Red Hat products for platform engineers

Red Hat Developer Hub

Red Hat Developer Hub is an enterprise-grade internal developer portal. It allows platform engineering teams to build a unified view into every area where engineering organizations need to be more productive. With software templates, software catalogs, dynamic plug-ins, and built-in support, it builds a reliable foundation for a great developer experience, especially when combined with Red Hat OpenShift.

Learn more about Red Hat Developer Hub

Red Hat Trusted Software Supply Chain

Red Hat Trusted Software Supply Chain streamlines compliance with organizational security practices for platform engineering teams. By leveraging Red Hat's established open source software supply chain expertise, it helps mitigate and reduce risks in software delivery. This solution enables development and security teams to adopt best practices quickly, with minimal effort and cost.

Learn more about Red Hat Trusted Software Supply Chain

Red Hat OpenShift

Red Hat OpenShift provides a rich set of APIs and CLIs, enabling platform engineers to interact with the platform programmatically and access resources such as applications, pods, services, routers, and configurations. It helps you automate the observability of the platform metrics. You can also automate infrastructure services with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization.

Learn more about Red Hat OpenShift