Discipline of building and maintaining internal developer platforms that enable self-service infrastructure and streamline application development. Like creating an internal cloud that makes it easy for developers to build and deploy apps.
Platform engineering teams build internal tools and templates so developers can deploy applications in minutes instead of weeks.
Platform Engineering is an operating model and set of practices, not a single cloud service. Teams typically assemble an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) using multiple managed services (e.g., Kubernetes, CI/CD, IAM, observability) plus custom tooling. Each cloud offers building blocks, but there is no 1:1 native service named “Platform Engineering.”