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In a context where digital architectures are becoming increasingly complex and business expectations continue to grow, organizations seek to accelerate their delivery cycles without accumulating operational debt. Platform engineering has emerged as a structured discipline aimed at transforming internal infrastructure into a product dedicated to developers, ensuring standardization, security, and self-sufficiency. By adopting this approach, IT leadership can industrialize delivery while preserving their teams’ creativity and agility. This article explores how to design and deploy an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) “as-a-product,” its tangible benefits, and the prerequisites for a successful transition.
Understanding Platform Engineering
Platform Engineering formalizes the design, building, and maintenance of an internal platform dedicated to developers. It positions infrastructure and tools as a product, complete with a roadmap, support, and business metrics.
Origin and Definition
Platform engineering draws its roots from the desire to consolidate DevOps and SRE best practices under product governance. It aims to create a centralized environment offering pre-integrated services, sparing developers from continually reconfiguring their pipelines and clusters.
This discipline takes inspiration from a product-driven model: internal needs are formalized, “user stories” for development teams are defined, features are prioritized, and adoption is measured through key performance indicators.
The result is an evolving platform that is documented and maintained as a service, capable of meeting the security, compliance, and scalability requirements of large enterprises.
Core Principles of Platform Engineering
One of the pillars is automation: every action must be repeatable through a pipeline or versioned script. Developers gain self-service access without relying on manual infrastructure interventions.
Standardization ensures consistency across development, testing, and production environments, minimizing configuration drift that can lead to production incidents.
Finally, extensibility is built in from the start: the platform must be able to integrate new modules (databases, observability tools, access quotas) without disrupting the entire ecosystem.
Initial Business Benefits
Adopting this approach drastically shortens the learning curve for new hires. Developers spend their time on business value instead of setting up CI/CD pipelines.
IT and SRE teams gain centralized visibility into resource consumption, simplifying budget tracking and resource allocation during traffic spikes or marketing campaigns.
Example: A Swiss bank implemented an internal platform for its mobile and web development teams. Onboarding time dropped from 4 weeks to 1 week per team, while maintaining strong security and compliance governance.
The Key Role of an Internal Developer Platform (IDP)
The Internal Developer Platform serves as the single interface between business requirements and technical infrastructure. It delivers reproducible, secure, and traceable environments in self-service for developers.
Self-Service and Reproducible Environments
The IDP offers a catalog of ready-to-use services—databases, message queues, monitoring tools, or serverless functions—accessible via API or web interface. Developers can deploy and configure these services without manual assistance.
Each code branch automatically generates an isolated environment for validating new features or fixes. These ephemeral deployments ensure test reproducibility and reduce side effects caused by configuration differences.
Environment consistency minimizes anomalies between development, testing, and production, boosting confidence in continuous deployment pipelines.
Observability and Security
An IDP natively integrates logging, distributed tracing, and monitoring solutions: all deployed services are automatically linked to centralized dashboards. Alerts are configured according to pre-defined business and technical thresholds.
Security mechanisms (authentication, authorization, data encryption at rest and in transit) are enforced by the platform, ensuring continuous compliance with internal and regulatory standards.
Security teams can audit every deployment and respond swiftly to anomalies without manually reviewing all configurations.
Governance and Scalability
The platform manages usage quotas, infrastructure costs, and resource lifecycle policies. IT managers receive detailed usage reports and can steer budgets in real time.
Platform enhancements follow a classic product rhythm: roadmaps, sprints, retrospectives. New feature requests feed into a prioritized backlog based on business impact.
Example: A Swiss insurer adopted an IDP for its project teams. Backlog-driven governance delivered 12 new observability and automation features in under 6 months, aligning the tool with business priorities.
Edana: strategic digital partner in Switzerland
We support mid-sized and large enterprises in their digital transformation
Structuring the Internal Platform: Challenges and Benefits
A well-structured platform accelerates onboarding and ensures technological consistency across teams. It provides a framework that grants developers autonomy while enforcing best practices.
Accelerated Onboarding and Skill Building
With centralized documentation, project templates, and clear usage guides, each developer saves time from day one. The effort to learn tools and configurations is minimized.
Internal training can focus on business value and domain specifics rather than infrastructure details.
Continuous feedback loops (retrospectives) drive platform improvements, ensuring progressive and shared skill development among teams.
Microservices Management and Technological Consistency
A well-structured platform enforces naming conventions, API standards, and uniform deployment workflows. This simplifies discovering and reusing existing microservices.
Standardizing stacks (language, runtime, libraries) reduces technological fragmentation and lowers maintenance costs associated with supporting multiple frameworks.
Multi-cloud or hybrid architectures are managed uniformly through abstractions that hide underlying complexity.
Framed Autonomy and Business Alignment
Business and technical teams collaborate through clearly defined user stories in the platform backlog. Each requirement is treated as an internal feature, with shared prioritization.
This product-centric approach fosters cross-functional collaboration and ensures the platform evolves in response to top business challenges.
Example: A Swiss industrial group structured its internal platform using this method. Aligning business requests, security requirements, and performance goals from the start reduced the average deployment time of new applications by 30%.
Classic DevOps vs. Platform Engineering: A Product Approach
Traditional DevOps often relies on disparate practices and ad-hoc scripts without a product mindset. Platform engineering unifies these practices under product governance, focusing on value for developers and the business.
Limitations of Ad-Hoc DevOps
In many environments, pipelines are crafted on the fly, resulting in heterogeneous scripts and sparse documentation. Each team reinvents the wheel to meet its specific needs.
Maintenance operations become costly and error-prone, as dependencies and versions are not centralized. Urgent fixes often derail the roadmap.
Without clear metrics, measuring the impact of changes and deployment reliability is difficult, leading to dissatisfaction among business and end-users.
The Product Approach in Platform Engineering
First, define the functional scope, objectives, and KPIs for the platform. Each enhancement or new service is managed as a product release, with testing, validation, and communication.
The roadmap is co-created by IT leadership, architects, SREs, and business representatives, balancing immediate needs with long-term vision.
Developer support is organized via a backlog, dedicated contact points, and a continuous feedback loop to adapt the platform rapidly to evolving requirements.
Measurable Gains: Velocity, Reliability, Cost
Organizations typically see a 20–40% increase in velocity by reducing repetitive tasks and providing instant access to resources.
Deployment reliability also improves: production incidents drop by 30–50% because the platform enforces quality, observability, and testing standards.
Financially, shared services and resource optimization (containers, cloud) can yield up to 25% savings on infrastructure bills.
Industrialize Your Delivery with Platform Engineering
Adopting a structured Internal Developer Platform as a product transforms relationships between developers, SREs, and business stakeholders. You achieve technological consistency, faster deployments, and cost control, all while ensuring robust security and governance. Each platform feature becomes a performance lever aligned with your strategic objectives.
Your teams retain their creative autonomy: they code and innovate while the platform handles orchestration, observability, compliance, and scaling. This clear separation of responsibilities prevents friction and streamlines development cycles.
At Edana, our experts are ready to help you define your roadmap, design your platform architecture, and oversee its implementation—embracing open source principles, modularity, and vendor lock-in avoidance. Together, let’s transform your delivery into an industrialized, agile process.
