Platform Engineering

2025: Platform Engineering: Why business needs a single development platform

As the IT infrastructure becomes more complex and the pressure on development teams grows, more companies are becoming interested in platform engineering and the formation of a separate platform team. In this article, expert Vyacheslav Bessonov shared at the end of June 2025 with TAdviser why a business should think about an internal development platform and what it is.

Why would a business think about Platform Engineering now

Let's start with the very concept. Platform engineering is a discipline that aims to create and maintain Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs). These platforms are integrated sets of tools, services and processes designed to increase the productivity of development teams and DevOps. Essentially, the platform acts as a self-service between a complex underlying infrastructure and developers, providing them with standardized, automated, and secure "building blocks" to build, deploy, and operate applications.

We also note that Gartner recognizes Platform Engineering as one of the main strategic technological trends, predicting that by 2026 80% large engineering organizations will create platform teams.^[1]

The answer to the question "why is it time for business to think about this" can be laid in three points:

Firstly, this is a logical milestone in the development of the industry, reflecting the processes of consolidation and automation that have already occurred in other complex areas. For example, in construction, disparate CAD tools for drawings, calculations and estimates merged into BIM platforms, and in chip design, many specialized utilities merged into integrated EDA platforms.

Platform engineering similarly solves the problem of the "zoo of technologies" and combines processes - CI/CD, configuration management, monitoring, logging, security and depletion - into one unified solution. Thus, the cognitive burden on developers is reduced and the effectiveness of all development is significantly increased, which makes this path inevitable for mature technology companies. Secondly, Platform Engineering has a direct impact on the growth of profitability and competitiveness.

This is not only about the convenience of developers, but also about the direct financial result for business. By automating routine processes through the platform, companies significantly increase the productivity of their R&D teams.

This directly leads to lower development costs and a reduction in Time-to-Market (TTM), which means earlier revenue generation and increased competitive positions.

According to Google Cloud and ESG, 55% of large companies have already implemented platform engineering by 2024, all of which noted a 28% to 71% reduction in TTM^[2]

Thirdly, the platform provides the "AI readiness" (AI-readiness) necessary these days. It unifies and automates processes, which greatly simplifies the implementation and scaling of AI solutions, allowing businesses to derive maximum value from them.

Building on the aforementioned research, 86% of companies consider Platform Engineering the key to unlocking AI's business value. At the same time, AI itself actively helps to develop platforms by automating routine and optimizing processes. Unsurprisingly, 94% of organizations see AI as a critical factor for Platform Engineering's future.

What is Platform Engineering: How it looks and works

So we figured out why the market came to Platform Engineering. Now let's figure out what it is in practice and what it looks like in everyday work.

In fact, Platform Engineering is the construction and development of an internal PaaS platform (Platform-as-a-Service) for developers. It is also often called IDP (Internal Developer Platform), that is, internal development platforms that significantly improve the developer experience (DevEx), allowing them to focus on creating a product. This is achieved through golden paths - ready-made, automated solutions for typical tasks (such as deployment or CI/CD).

Imagine that a developer wants to create a new microservice or update an existing one. Without Platform Engineering, he would have to independently or with the help of DevOps engineers:

1. Manually configure the code repository.
2. Write Dockerfile.
3. Configure the CI/CD pipeline in Jenkins/GitLab CI.
4. Configure Kubernetes manifests for deployment.
5. Connect monitoring and alerts in Prometheus/Grafana.
6. Configure the collection of logs in the ELK stack.
7. Ensure security and policy compliance.
8. And so on... each time, for each new service or even update, which leads to errors and slowdown.

With Platform Engineering (IDP) for the developer, the process looks completely different. The developer enters the self-service portal (this can be a web interface, a CLI tool or an IDE plugin), which is the "face" of the platform. There he:

1. Selects the template of the new service: "New microservice on// Python" GoJava or" Need a new database Kafka Postgres/-topic. " The platform provides ready-made, pre-configured templates that already include your company's best practices, security standards, and all necessary integrations.
2. Populates the minimum parameters, such as service name, owner, description.
3. Click New or Expand.

What happens "under the hood," and what does the developer get?

1) Automatic deployment
The platform itself creates a repository, configures CI/CD pipelines, generates the necessary configurations for Kubernetes, connects monitoring, logging, notification systems. All this is done automatically, according to the rules and standards laid down in the platform.

2) Standardization and Consistency
All services created through the platform will have the same structure, use consistent versions of libraries and tools, and comply with internal security policies. This minimizes the "zoo" of technology and simplifies support.

3) Reduced errors
Because most manual settings are automated and standardized, the likelihood of human error is drastically reduced.

4) Built-in security and compliance
The platform initially includes the necessary security checks (SecOps) and ensures compliance, which relieves this burden on individual developers.

5) Cognitive load reduction
The developer works with a simple and understandable platform interface without delving into the complexity of the infrastructure. He thinks about the business task, not how to deploy the Kubernetes cluster.

6) Speed up work
From the idea to the working code in production, it takes much less time. A developer can launch a new service in minutes, not hours or days.

7) Transparency
A single platform provides centralized dashboards for monitoring performance, resource consumption and costs (FinOps), giving the developer a complete picture of its applications.

Thus, Platform Engineering turns a complex infrastructure into a convenient, self-service "factory" for developers, significantly accelerating innovation and increasing the overall efficiency of IT departments.

Platform Engineering in Practice: Global Cases and Results

This approach has been successfully adopted by leading technology companies around the world, bringing tangible results to them. The cases described below show how internal platforms are transforming development processes, allowing unprecedented speeds and scales to be achieved.

Cases of world giants:

• Netflix.
Netflix has developed a powerful in-house platform that allows thousands of engineers to deploy and manage hundreds of microservices daily, providing continuous content delivery and personalized experiences for millions of users. Their platform abstracts the complexity of cloud infrastructure by providing developers with self-service tools for deployment, monitoring, resilience testing (chaos engineering), and application lifecycle management. This allowed Netflix to maintain a high speed of innovation despite the incredible complexity of their distributed system.

• Spotify и Backstage.
Spotify has created its famous Internal Developer Platform called Backstage, a leader among IDP frameworks. It is an open source project that allows developers to easily create, manage, and discover their microservices and access documentation and tools. Backstage solves the problem of the "zoo" of tools and helps developers quickly navigate the complex ecosystem of Spotify services. It provides a single "dashboard" for all aspects of development, which significantly reduces the time spent on onboarding new employees and speeds up the process of creating new functions.

• Google.
Google is actively implementing a platform approach to provide scalable CI/CD and to work with AI/ML models. Their in-house platforms allow thousands of engineers to work efficiently with vast amounts of data and run complex computational tasks to train machine learning models, the backbone of products such as search, Google Maps and YouTube.

Cases in Russia:

• VK Cloud.
The company is actively developing its approach to the Dev Platform, giving companies the opportunity to build their own internal IDPs based on their cloud infrastructure. This allows Russian companies to use ready-made components and VK Cloud expertise to accelerate their platform construction.

• Yandex.
  

Yandex, with its amount of data, complex services and the constant need for the rapid withdrawal of new products (including AI solutions), is a vivid example of the use of platform engineering. Yandex Platform Engineering (YPE) is a set of tools for the development and operation of Yandex products. YPE's goal is to provide an efficient development cycle, allowing thousands of engineers to focus on product creation rather than infrastructure management.

Almost the entire "bigtech" both abroad and in Russia is actively developing internal platforms. This often happens without the official Internal Developer Platform (IDP) label, but, in fact, this is exactly what they are building.

If everyone is looking towards Platform Engineering, then why not implement?

Despite the obvious advantages and increasing popularity of Platform Engineering, confirmed by the examples of global and Russian giants, many companies are still hesitant to fully implement or face serious difficulties along the way. The reasons why Platform Engineering remains a goal rather than a reality for part of the business lie in a number of significant challenges and pitfalls.

One of the main barriers is the high entry threshold, which requires quite mature processes from the point of view of DevOps. Platform engineering is not a panacea for immature commands or chaotic processes; on the contrary, it requires a certain level of automation, understanding of CI/CD, infrastructure principles as code (IaC) and close interaction between development and operation teams. Trying to implement a complex platform on top of unstructured processes often leads to failure.

The next significant factor is significant initial investment. The creation of an internal platform requires a serious investment in resources: this is the creation of a platform team, specialized software, equipment, and the time required to design, develop and implement the platform. These costs can be daunting, especially for companies with tight budgets or a short planning horizon.

Also, one of the key problems is the variety of requests from different teams, which makes the standardization process difficult. Developers in different departments or product teams can use different programming languages, frameworks, databases, and workflows. An attempt to create a "one-stop" platform that satisfies everyone can lead to either an overly complex system or an inability to meet specific needs, which will cause resistance and disregard of the platform. Finding a balance between standardization and flexibility is no easy task.

For large and established organizations, it is difficult to change the entrenched processes in large business. Internal resistance, inertia, bureaucracy and the habit of old ways of working can be huge obstacles. Implementation of Platform Engineering often means cultural change, reallocation of responsibility and changing work habits, which requires strong management support and a clear change management strategy.

Finally, there is a serious fear: "What if we build a platform, and no one will use it?" This fear is well founded. If the platform does not solve the real "pain" of developers, is too difficult to use, does not meet their expectations, or is perceived as an imposed tool, it risks being rejected. This emphasizes the importance of a customer-centric approach when creating IDP: the platform should be a product for internal users (developers), which means that it needs to be actively developed, received feedback and constantly improved so that it remains in demand and valuable.

Thus, despite Platform Engineering's enormous potential, its successful implementation requires not only technical skills, but also the maturity of processes, strategic investments, the ability to manage change and a deep understanding of the needs of internal customers.

See also

• DevOps

Notes