Definition. The discipline of building and operating an internal developer platform (IDP): a curated collection of services, templates, pipelines and self-service tools that product teams use to deploy, operate and observe applications without deep ops knowledge. Platform engineering is product work, not classic ticket-driven ops.

Why it matters. For mid-sized tech teams this is the realistic response to the pressure between low headcount and rising complexity (multi-cloud, K8s, AI workflows, compliance). A standardised platform scales better than any individual solution per team.

Related. GitOps, Declarative Infrastructure, Kubernetes, Sovereign Infrastructure