If we’re being honest, most engineering orgs aren’t actually suffering from bad tools. They’re suffering from a massive amount of cognitive overhead.
We’ve reached this weird point where we expect every product team to not only ship features but also be part-time cloud architects, CI/CD experts, and security specialists. They’re managing secrets, wrestling with Terraform, and trying to figure out why their observability dashboards look like a Christmas tree. It’s too much. It’s never been sustainable, and we’re finally starting to admit that out loud. That admission is basically why platform engineering is becoming a thing.
The real shift isn’t about hiring more people to manage the mess; it’s about treating the developer experience as an actual product. It shouldn’t be an accident that things work.
Stop grouping DevOps, SRE, and Platforms together
It drives me a bit crazy when people use these terms interchangeably. They aren’t different names for the same job.
- DevOps is really just a cultural agreement. It’s the “you build it, you run it” mentality where developers and ops aren’t at each other’s throats. It’s a mindset, not a team you can just hire off LinkedIn.
- SRE is the governance layer. This is where the math happens. You set your SLIs and SLOs so you actually have a data-driven reason to stop shipping when things are breaking. It takes the “gut feeling” out of whether a system is healthy.
- Platform Engineering is the physical manifestation of those ideas. It’s the team that builds the internal paved road so that the “right way” to do things is also the easiest way.
Moving away from Hero Culture
This is a big one for me. In a lot of places, we still praise the person who stays up until midnight to fix a production outage. We also praise the person that somehow always has all the answers. But if you’re constantly relying on heroes to keep the lights on, your system is fundamentally broken. Ask yourself this question: If those heroes get a better offer and leave your company, what happens?
Reliability has to be baked into the architecture, not manually maintained by exhausted engineers. When you actually get logs, metrics, and traces talking to each other, you stop reacting to fires and start seeing the smoke beforehand. You design for things to fail because, eventually, they will. The goal is to make sure that failure doesn’t require a midnight page.
Platforms Are Becoming Products
The teams that are getting this right are the ones treating their platform like a product for their own developers.
That means you don’t have ten different teams interpreting system health in ten different ways. You get unified reports and a shared language. It also means you move toward automated governance. If a deployment is a mess or doesn’t meet security standards, the system should just reject it. I’d much rather have a pipeline fail than have to sit through another approval board meeting or a 50-message Slack thread.
When you centralize the undifferentiated heavy lifting (the stuff that has to happen but doesn’t actually make the company money), you let product engineers focus on the work they actually enjoy.
Where This Is All Going
I’ve seen single platform teams effectively support hundreds of developers, and this is good leverage.
Ideally, infrastructure should feel like a utility, kind of like the electricity in your house. You don’t think about it, it just works. We’re trying to get to a point where the guardrails are invisible, the systems are self-healing, and we can all spend more time building things that actually matter to the business instead of fighting with YAML files.
