In the last 6 months, across the platform engineering certification course, my webinars, roundtables, and meetings at conferences, I’ve taken questions from 800 people on platform engineering. These are the top 5, and here are their answers.

1. Is platform engineering just a rebrand of DevOps or SRE? No. Platform engineering is an evolution that includes the best aspects of DevOps and SRE, but more usable by most teams and orgs. It is a “socio-technical” blend of tooling, and culture through the abstraction, automation, and standardization benefits of the building of an Internal Developer Platform, and the product management benefits of Platform as a Product (treating that IDP like a product, with devs as customers).
2. Why shouldn’t I just implement Backstage? Backstage is a tool with incredible potential, but it is NOT your platform. It’s the frontend layer of your Internal Developer Platform. You also need to understand the actual total cost of ownership of Backstage, Cortex might “cost” and Backstage is “free”. But if you require at least 2-3 engineers full-time to setup Backstage, then 1 to manage it… suddenly Cortex or another portal looks a whole lot cheaper to be your frontend layer.
3. How do we actually start? From looking at 100s of successful (and unsuccessful platform) initiatives, the Minimum Viable Platform (MVP) process is in my view the only way to go. You start small with 1 team and a sample app that mostly closely represents your estate. This lets you measure more easily, fine-tune your cultural questions, get everyone aligned, and prove value. You then expand.
4. I already have Kubernetes and Terraform. Why do I need an Internal Developer Platform? K8s & Terraform are pieces of the puzzle. They are not an Internal Developer Platform. Also - I want you to go ask all your developers whether they like working themselves directly in Terraform or Kubernetes. If you find one - then come back;)
5. Isn’t platform engineering just hype? Yes, there is hype. The certification course has grown 5x in the last 6 months, and this newsletter has grown 20x in 2 years. But the data is there, 51% of orgs have started platform teams in the last 3 years. 80% are expected to have IDPs by 2026. And those IDPs will eat up more and more of those enterprises engineering. This is the future.

What are your biggest questions? Reply to this and let me know!