chapter one

1 What is Platform Engineering?

This chapter covers

Definition and outcomes of platform engineering (PE)
Why should organizations build and use platform engineering?
Mental models and core principles of platform engineering
How platform engineering differs from DevOps, SRE and Developer Experience (DevEx)?
Impact of GenAI on platform engineering

Throughout this book we will imagine working for a company called PETech that is facing problems with inefficient practices deploying and operating software to production, which will be similar to situations we have seen in many real companies. PETech’s problems are significant, and platform engineering practices will be shown to dramatically improve operations. The problems at your company may be similar, and by following the journey of PETech, hopefully you will be able to see how using platform engineering practices and implementing an engineering platform can improve things!

The Background of PETech

1.1 What is Platform Engineering?

1.2 Why should I care about Platform Engineering?

1.3 When to use Platform Engineering principles?

1.4 When do these principles not apply?

1.5 Foundational Concepts in Platform Engineering

1.5.1 Platform Product Management

1.5.2 Platform Engineering Principles

1.5.3 Observability

1.5.4 Continuous Deployment via Pipeline (CI/CD)

1.5.5 Self-Service Functionality

1.5.6 Compliance and Governance

1.5.7 Cost and Sustainability

1.5.8 Security

1.6 Platform Product Domains

1.6.1 Customer Identity Provider

1.6.2 Cloud Administration Identity

1.6.3 Cloud Account Baseline

1.6.4 Transit Network Layer

1.6.5 Cloud Service Control Plane Base

1.6.6 Managed Control Plane Services

1.6.7 Managed Control Plane Extensions

1.6.8 Platform Product Services

1.7 Platform Engineering Enablers

1.7.1 Developer Experience

1.7.2 DevOps

1.7.3 Site Reliability Engineering

1.8 Impact of Generative AI in the PE space

1.8.1 Identifying areas of focus

1.8.2 Evolving Strategy with GenAI

1.9 Summary

1.9.1 Chapter Footnotes