by Evgeny Zubkov
DevOps Engineer at Coherent Solutions
DevOps changed how we build and deploy software—but it's not sufficient anymore. As complexity explodes and systems expand to manage millions of environments, containers, cloud resources, and compliance guardrails, managing it all has pushed DevOps to its limits. That's where platform engineering enters the picture: a smarter, more integrated, self-service solution that abstracts operational sprawl and puts powerful, developer-friendly tools at your fingertips.
In this article, we break down why DevOps is evolving, what platform engineering is, and how innovation-led companies are using it to drive faster, safer, and wiser.
Contents
What Is Platform Engineering vs. DevOps?
Roles and Goals: A Quick Breakdown
Key Components of a Modern Internal Developer Platform
Zooming in on Benefits of Platform Engineering
Your Next Step in Smarter Software Delivery
What Is Platform Engineering vs. DevOps?
DevOps and platform engineering differ in ways that shape how developers build and deliver software. Before we get into the comparison, let’s define these two concepts:
DevOps is a culture, practice, and set of tools that bridge the gap between development and operations, enabling continuous delivery. It aims to improve collaboration between development and operations teams to get software to market faster.
Platform engineering is a discipline that builds internal platforms that provide developers with self-service tools to efficiently deploy and manage applications. The main goal is to simplify the development and operations processes by providing teams with the necessary tools and resources to complete tasks independently.
A Side-by-Side Comparison
Let's explore the key differences between DevOps and platform engineering across four dimensions: focus, complexity, developer autonomy, and security.
Focus:
- DevOps emphasizes cultural change and CI/CD practices to accelerate releases, reduce friction, and improve feedback loops between development and operations teams.
- Platform engineering is focused on building and maintaining platforms that encapsulate complexity and provide developers with a set of tools to deploy and operate applications efficiently using a uniform interface.
- In DevOps, raw Kubernetes clusters, Terraform scripts, and complex CI/CD pipelines are often exposed directly to developers, and they must understand and navigate through these underlying technologies.
- In Platform Engineering, platforms and services are designed to abstract complexity. High-level abstractions (e.g., a YAML manifest or API calls) are used by developers, reducing cognitive load and speeding up development.
- DevOps practices standardize and automate processes but most commonly leave setup and management of infrastructure in the hands of a central operations team.
- Platform engineering institutionalizes self-service whereby developers can immediately utilize provisioning flows, application templates, environment instantiation, and ready-to-use CI/CD pipelines through a unified platform interface. Developers can now spin up environments and deploy apps without the ops team having to intervene.
- DevOps promotes "shift-left" with security and compliance checks, ideally embedding them into the development, testing, and build phases. However, tools and policies may still be scattered and inconsistently enforced.
- Platform engineering includes governance, compliance testing, and security best practices in the platform itself, such that any service that's deployed through the platform is in compliance with the company's policies automatically, reducing risk and delivering consistency across the infrastructure.
Roles and Goals: A Quick Breakdown
|
Aspect |
DevOps |
Platform Engineering |
|
Primary Goal |
Improve collaboration between Dev and Ops teams, automate software delivery, and enhance reliability. |
Build and maintain internal platforms that abstract infrastructure complexity and improve developer productivity. |
|
Scope |
Covers the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC), including CI/CD, monitoring, security, and automation. |
Focuses on creating scalable, reusable infrastructure and deployment tools for development teams. |
|
Who Uses It? |
DevOps engineers, software developers, IT operations. |
Platform engineers who build tools for developers to use internally. |
|
Tools and Practices |
CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code, monitoring, observability, Kubernetes, automation. |
Developer portals, internal developer platforms, Kubernetes, APIs, service catalogs, golden paths. |
|
Key Focus Areas |
Automation, security, monitoring, incident response, site reliability. |
Developer experience, platform scalability, self-service, standardization. |
While DevOps focuses on automating and improving collaboration between development and operations, platform engineering builds internal developer platforms (IDPs) to foster a developer-centric approach and provide standardized reusable tools.
What is Best for Your Team?
Consider your environment's complexity and your team's needs.
If you're already running complex systems at scale, platform engineering adds structure and reliability. If your setup is simpler and the challenges are more cultural than technical, DevOps alone is enough.
Platform engineering provides a standardized, robust platform for environments hosting multiple complex applications that reduces differences between development and production. This approach ensures consistent configurations, reliable infrastructure provisioning, and clear operational boundaries at scale.
When the delivery pipeline is relatively simple, and the primary issues stem from cultural or organizational factors, a DevOps model is your go-to choice. Development teams can focus on improving collaboration, speed, and feedback loops without forming an entire internal developer platform or introducing a dedicated platform engineering team.
Embrace Platform Engineering
Foster efficiency and quality in your software delivery process and eliminate bottlenecks.
Key Components of a Modern Internal Developer Platform
An internal developer platform offers a more structured, product-like approach to managing development tools. So, companies choose it more often now. Let’s examine the key points.
Infrastructure as Code
Tools like Terraform, Pulumi, or Crossplane reliably define and provision infrastructure. With platform engineering, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) modules are standardized, curated, and packaged into reusable components.
Container Orchestration and Service Meshes
Kubernetes provides a scalable foundation, while service meshes like Istio or Linkerd ensure secure, observable, and consistent communication across services.
CI/CD Pipelines and Templates
Preconfigured CI/CD pipelines reduce complexity. For example, a developer pushes code to a repository, triggering a Jenkins or GitHub Actions pipeline that uses an organizationally sanctioned Helm chart to deploy the application. No extra configuration is needed on the developer’s side.
Internal APIs and Developer Tooling
A self-service portal or CLI tool can interact with back-end APIs to provision resources or deploy applications. This can involve:
# Example CLI command for developers to spin up a standard environment
myplatform create-environment --app myservice --env staging
This command translates into Terraform apply actions behind the scenes, Kubernetes namespace creation, and service configuration—all of which are hidden from the developer.
Observability and Feedback Loops
Unified logging, metrics, and tracing systems (like Prometheus and OpenTelemetry) are integrated into the platform. Developers can easily access application performance dashboards without manually setting up disparate tooling.
Zooming in on Benefits of Platform Engineering
The organic blend of DevOps and platform engineering creates one internal developer platform, bringing numerous benefits to the software delivery process and the value developers and clients notice and appreciate.
Improved Developer Productivity
Platform engineering streamlines the development process by abstracting infrastructure complexity and providing ready-to-use building blocks. Gartner notes that IDPs ease complexity and release the productivity of software teams by reducing the cognitive load of modern toolchains. Developers spend less time managing environments or troubleshooting low-level operations. They can focus on delivering features and accelerating delivery cycles.
Standardization and Consistency
A robust internal developer platform enforces standardized configurations, deployment procedures, security policies, and monitoring solutions. Every application follows the same proven patterns, reducing operational inconsistencies and speeding up onboarding for new team members.
Enhanced Security and Compliance
Platform engineering integrates security guardrails and compliance checks into the platform core. Instead of relying solely on manual procedures or developer diligence, the security requirements are automatically enforced. A well-implemented platform can eliminate up to 90% of manual security and architecture checklist steps by automating them. These built-in security and compliance checks reduce vulnerabilities and ensure regulatory standards remain consistent across all deployments.
Reduced Operational Overhead
Common infrastructure tasks are packaged into internal developer platforms, removing the need for each development team to handle these duties independently. IDPs provision compute resources, configure CI/CD pipelines, and set up observability. Fewer support requests and manual interventions translate to lower operational costs and greater scalability.
Flexible Self-Service Capabilities
Platform engineering offers user-friendly APIs, command-line tools, and web interfaces. Developers can self-serve their infrastructure needs to rapidly prototype, test, and scale applications on demand without waiting for external approvals. Companies with IDPs achieve multiple daily deployments instead of once every few weeks. Companies can leverage shorter innovation cycles and quicker feedback loops.
Better Observability and Reliability
Platforms often include pre-configured logging, metrics, and tracing solutions. Critical incident counts drop by ~20% after implementing a platform engineering approach. The baked-in observability features help developers quickly identify performance bottlenecks, understand application behavior, and diagnose issues. Companies see improved reliability, faster mean time to resolution (MTTR), and greater operational confidence.
Your Next Step in Smarter Software Delivery
The evolution from DevOps to platform engineering reflects a broader push to simplify software development and IT operations. The change alters the focus from a shared responsibility culture and automation to a developer-centric experience and gives higher productivity levels with internal developer platforms.
Platform engineering benefits companies through streamlined workflows, secure and compliant processes, and operational consistency. With platform engineering, developers can focus on value delivery, making the software delivery process more stable. This approach aligns with modern cloud-native trends, speeds up the software delivery process, and supports business growth.
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