Platform engineering has emerged as the discipline of building and maintaining internal developer platforms that enable self-service capabilities for software development teams. Rather than expecting every developer to be an expert in Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, observability, and cloud infrastructure, platform teams abstract this complexity behind well-designed interfaces that let developers focus on building features. The result is faster delivery, fewer misconfigurations, and more consistent operational practices across the organization.
The Internal Developer Platform
An Internal Developer Platform is a curated set of tools, workflows, and self-service capabilities that reduces the cognitive load on development teams. It typically includes golden paths for creating new services from vetted templates, automated CI/CD pipelines that enforce quality gates, infrastructure provisioning through simple declarative interfaces, and observability tooling that comes pre-configured for every service. The platform is not a rigid mandate but a paved road that makes the right way the easy way, while still allowing teams to go off-road when they have a genuine need.
Platform as a Product
The most successful platform teams treat their platform as a product with internal developers as customers. This means conducting user research to understand developer pain points, maintaining a roadmap driven by actual developer needs rather than technology trends, measuring adoption and satisfaction metrics, and providing documentation and support. A platform that developers do not want to use is a failed platform, regardless of how technically impressive it is. Product thinking ensures that the platform evolves based on what actually helps developers deliver faster and more reliably.
"The goal of platform engineering is not to build a platform. It is to make every development team in the organization more productive and more reliable without requiring them to become infrastructure experts."
— Ascylla Engineering
Developer Portals and Service Catalogs
Developer portals like Backstage provide a unified interface for discovering services, viewing documentation, checking build status, and provisioning infrastructure. A well-maintained service catalog gives teams visibility into what exists across the organization, who owns it, and how to interact with it. This reduces duplication, simplifies onboarding, and creates a single pane of glass for the entire software estate. Combined with scaffolding tools that generate new services from approved templates, developer portals dramatically accelerate the path from idea to deployed service.
Measuring Platform Success
Platform success is measured by developer outcomes, not platform features. Key metrics include deployment frequency, lead time for changes, time to onboard a new developer, and the ratio of developer time spent on features versus infrastructure toil. Track platform adoption voluntarily rather than mandating usage. If teams are actively choosing the platform over alternatives, you are building something valuable. If adoption is low, conduct user research to understand why and iterate.
Ascylla helps organizations design and build internal developer platforms that genuinely improve developer productivity. From Backstage implementation and golden path design to CI/CD standardization and infrastructure self-service, our platform engineering consultants bring practical experience from building platforms at organizations of every scale.