Building a Platform Team

A platform engineering team should be structured to support scalability, reliability, and developer efficiency. Typically, it includes key roles such as platform engineers, site reliability engineers (SREs), DevOps specialists, and security engineers. The team should follow a product mindset, treating the platform as an internal product with clear ownership and user-centric design. Collaboration with development teams is crucial to streamline workflows and provide self-service capabilities. Effective structuring involves cross-functional expertise, automation-driven processes, and a focus on observability, security, and continuous improvement to optimize software delivery.

A platform engineering team is responsible for building, maintaining, and optimizing the infrastructure and tools that support software development and deployment. Key responsibilities include automating workflows, ensuring system reliability and scalability, providing self-service platforms for developers, and managing deployment pipelines. The team also handles infrastructure provisioning, monitoring, security, and troubleshooting. Additionally, they collaborate with DevOps, development, and operations teams to streamline processes, improve efficiency, and ensure a seamless user experience for both internal and external stakeholders.

Platform engineering team structures can vary based on the organization's needs, but common topologies include:

1. Centralized: A single platform engineering team serves the entire organization, building and maintaining common tools, infrastructure, and services for all teams. This promotes consistency but may become a bottleneck in large organizations.

2. Decentralized: Platform engineers are embedded within individual product or development teams. This approach allows closer alignment with specific product needs but can lead to duplicated efforts across teams.Federated: A hybrid of centralized and decentralized models, where a central platform engineering team provides core services and standards, while smaller, domain-specific teams manage their own platforms. This allows for consistency and flexibility.

3. The choice of topology depends on factors like company size, product complexity, and the level of autonomy each team requires.

Platform engineering and DevOps are closely related but focus on different aspects. Platform engineering is centered around creating and maintaining the infrastructure and tools that developers need to build, test, and deploy applications. It involves providing a stable, scalable environment and automating processes like provisioning, monitoring, and deploying resources. On the other hand, DevOps refers to a culture and set of practices aimed at fostering collaboration between development and operations teams. It emphasizes continuous integration, automation, and improving the speed and quality of software delivery. While both aim to enhance the software development process, platform engineering focuses on the tools and infrastructure, whereas DevOps emphasizes practices, collaboration, and faster delivery.

In short, platform engineers create the systems supporting development, DevOps optimizes workflows, and SREs focus on ensuring systems are stable and performant in production. A Platform Engineer builds and maintains the infrastructure and tools that development teams use to deploy, manage, and scale applications. They focus on automating infrastructure and ensuring that the platform is reliable and efficient for developers. DevOps is a cultural and technical approach that promotes collaboration between development and operations teams. It focuses on automating the software development lifecycle, improving communication, and speeding up software delivery by creating a seamless workflow from development to production. SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) focuses on ensuring the reliability, availability, and performance of systems in production. SREs combine software engineering practices with IT operations, emphasizing proactive monitoring, incident management, and automation to maintain system stability and scalability.