Engineering platform team

As explained in Platform Engineering on Kubernetes

A platform team is an organizational team responsible for defining, building, and maintaining an internal developer platform.

An engineering platform team defines, builds, and maintains an internal developer platform that helps application teams deliver software faster. It selects tools, exposes APIs, creates Golden Paths to production, and treats the platform as an internal product for development teams. section 1.3

A platform team typically:

• Understands application teams’ needs for IT services, cloud resources, credentials, and tools. section 6.4
• Creates automation and APIs that hide unnecessary infrastructure complexity from application developers. section 6.4 section 7.4
• Manages highly available platform tools and establishes contracts, boundaries, and expectations between platform and application teams. section 6.4
• Improves delivery through Golden Paths, consistent capabilities across environments, and mechanisms such as feature flags and release strategies. section 1.3 section 7.4

Platform walking skeleton

A Kubernetes-based walking skeleton can combine Crossplane, ArgoCD, and vcluster to provision development environments and offer a simplified API. Application teams focus on customer-facing features while the platform team manages the underlying tools and configurations. section 6.5 section 6.4

Figure 1.14 Platform teams take the work done by developers safely to production.

Shows how platform teams turn application-team work into safer, more automated paths to production. section 1.3

How Platform Engineering on Kubernetes covers it

How deep it goes

Explains responsibilities, APIs, artifacts, and team boundaries, while deferring capabilities such as observability, metrics, logs, and service meshes.

Examples

Uses Kubernetes walking-skeleton tooling, simplified APIs, Crossplane, ArgoCD, vcluster, Dapr, feature flags, Knative, and Argo Rollouts.

What you can do after

Build it from scratch by defining users and APIs, assembling platform tools, provisioning environments, and creating safer paths for application delivery.

How it connects

Connects platform teams with application development teams, operations teams, cloud providers, Kubernetes, APIs, Golden Paths, and internal products.

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Also explained in

• 

  liveBookmanning.com
  Effective Platform EngineeringA platform product team is a team responsible for developing and evolving an internal platform product.
• 

  liveBookmanning.com
  Architecture Modernization: Socio-technical alignment of software, strategy, and structureA platform team is a team responsible for building and operating an internal platform that supports software development and delivery.

Compare how 3 books explain engineering platform team →

Related concepts

• team topologieskind of · Team Topologies is an organizational design framework for structuring teams and their interactions to improve the flow of value in software delivery.
• golden pathproduces · A golden path is a recommended and supported workflow that guides developers through a standardized route for accomplishing software-development or delivery tasks.
• DevOpscontrasts with · DevOps is a set of organizational, cultural, and technical practices that integrates software development and IT operations through collaboration, automation, and feedback.
• stream-aligned teamuses · A stream-aligned team is a long-lived team organized around a continuous flow of customer or business value, with responsibility for delivering and maintaining its product or service.

This explainer was generated by Manning's knowledge graph from the text of Platform Engineering on Kubernetes. The section links point to the parts of the book it draws on.