The Rise of Platform Engineering: Why Teams Are Doubling Down on Developer Experience

Software engineering has always required internal tooling—pipelines, environments, observability, secrets management. But over the past few years, something’s become clearer: how we build those internal systems matters just as much as what we ship externally.

More and more companies are recognizing the value of investing in shared infrastructure and workflows that help engineers move faster, safer, and with less friction. It’s not a trend—it’s a mindset shift. And it’s one that’s creating happier teams and better products.

The industry now calls this discipline Platform Engineering.

🧭 Platform Engineering Isn’t New—But It Feels New

Many teams have been quietly building internal platforms for years. The difference today is intention. Platform Engineering isn’t just a side effort or set of tools—it’s a dedicated practice, increasingly treated like a product in itself.

And that clarity has brought momentum, community, and a renewed focus on the developer experience.

🛠️ What Is Platform Engineering?

Platform Engineering is the art and discipline of designing self-service, scalable, and secure internal systems that let developers focus on building products—not fighting pipelines or provisioning environments.

Instead of every team solving the same infrastructure problems over and over again, platform teams provide paved paths: standardized ways to develop, deploy, and operate software that are trusted, supported, and fast.

They don’t slow teams down—they remove the blockers so others can move with clarity and confidence.

✨ Why the Momentum Now?

Ask any developer what’s slowing them down, and you’ll often hear:

• “Staging’s broken again.”
• “CI is flaky.”
• “I’m not sure who owns this environment.”
• “Where are the logs for this service?”

As companies scale, so do these pain points. And when you have 20+ teams navigating 20 slightly different ways of building and shipping—productivity, reliability, and morale suffer.

Platform Engineering brings consistency, automation, and predictability to all of this. And when you get it right? Developers don’t just move faster—they feel lighter.

There’s a certain magic in watching a new hire ship their first change on Day 2—not because they’re a genius, but because the platform made everything seamless.

🚀 What Do Platform Teams Actually Build?

While every organization’s platform looks a little different, most include:

• Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs):
  Dashboards, CLIs, or portals for self-service infrastructure, deployments, and logs.

• Golden Paths:
  Opinionated templates and workflows that make it easy to “do the right thing” by default.

• CI/CD Pipelines:
  Reusable, secure, and fast pipelines that don’t require engineers to reinvent the wheel.

• Built-in Observability:
  Preconfigured logging, metrics, and tracing that help developers debug and monitor effortlessly.

• Secrets & Config Management:
  Secure, centralized systems for environment variables, credentials, and app config.

At Nurdsoft, we’ve seen how even lightweight platforms—when thoughtfully designed—can dramatically reduce onboarding time, increase deployment confidence, and build cross-team trust.

🧩 How Does It Fit with DevOps and SRE?

Platform Engineering doesn’t replace DevOps or SRE—it empowers them.

• DevOps promotes collaboration between dev and ops teams.
• SRE focuses on reliability and uptime.
• Platform Engineering provides the tooling and automation that both depend on.

Think of Platform Engineering as the system that supports everyone behind the scenes—from developers to security to QA.

☕ Coffee Shop Analogy (Because Who Doesn’t Love One?)

Imagine developers are baristas, making incredible coffee for customers (your users).

Without a good platform:

• Each barista has to roast their own beans
• Build their own espresso machine
• Clean their own filters
• Manually track orders

With a solid internal platform:

• Everything is ready
• The process is predictable
• Baristas focus on creativity, not cleanup

That’s Platform Engineering. It clears the clutter so builders can build.

💬 A Quiet Shift That Makes a Loud Impact

What excites us most about Platform Engineering isn’t just the tooling—it’s the human impact.

It’s engineers smiling because “it just works.”
It’s teams focusing on their product, not plumbing.
It’s operations teams finally sleeping through the night.

Great platforms don’t just help you move fast—they make it feel effortless.

🌱 Final Thought

Whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been enabling teams for years, now is the perfect time to take a more intentional approach to your platform.

You don’t need a massive budget or team to begin. Sometimes, it starts with one question:

“What’s slowing our developers down—and how can we solve that once for everyone?”

That’s the heart of Platform Engineering.
That’s how you build something that lasts.

📌 Coming Next Week:

“The Internal Developer Platform (IDP) Demystified: What It Is and Why It Matters”
We’ll dive deeper into how teams are building IDPs that developers love—and the common traits of great ones.