Platform Engineering: Building Internal Developer Platforms for Velocity
Platform engineering has emerged as the dominant organizational response to the complexity of modern software delivery. According to Gartner's June 2026 Platform Engineering Survey, 80% of organizations with more than 50 developers now have a formal platform engineering team, up from 45% in 2023. Internal developer platforms (IDPs) provide a "golden path" — a curated set of tools, templates, and self-service capabilities that enable development teams to build, deploy, and operate software without becoming experts in the underlying infrastructure, security, and compliance domains.
The core insight driving platform engineering: asking every development team to master Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, security scanning, observability, and cost optimization is neither efficient nor realistic. Building a platform that abstracts this complexity behind self-service interfaces — enabling developers to focus on business logic while the platform handles infrastructure concerns — increases both developer productivity and operational reliability.
Building an Effective Internal Developer Platform
Platform as a Product
The most important principle of platform engineering: treat the platform as a product, not as infrastructure. The platform has customers (development teams), must solve their real problems (not just the problems platform engineers find interesting), and must compete for adoption (developers can't be forced to use a bad platform; they'll work around it). This means: understanding developer needs through user research, prioritizing platform features based on developer impact, measuring platform success through developer satisfaction and productivity, and continuously improving based on feedback.
Golden Path Templates
IDPs provide "golden path" templates — pre-configured, security-reviewed, operationally-proven configurations for common application types. Developers select a template appropriate for their application (web service, event-driven function, data pipeline) and the platform handles infrastructure provisioning, security configuration, monitoring setup, and CI/CD pipeline creation automatically. Templates embody organizational best practices while reducing developer cognitive load.
Self-Service Capabilities
A platform that requires platform engineering team involvement for every action is just a different bottleneck. The platform must provide true self-service: developers provision infrastructure, deploy applications, view logs and metrics, manage configurations, and roll back changes — all without opening a ticket or waiting for someone else to do it.
The Role of Low-Code in Platform Engineering
Low-code and no-code platforms are increasingly used to build IDPs themselves — accelerating platform development and enabling platform customization. Additionally, low-code platforms serve as a complement to IDPs by enabling business-developed applications that don't require the full DevOps toolchain.
Why Informat Supports Platform Engineering
Informat provides: low-code platform building capabilities, pre-built templates for common application types, self-service deployment and operations, integrated DevSecOps, and a platform architecture that eliminates much of the infrastructure complexity that IDPs are built to manage.
Conclusion
Platform engineering is not about building a platform for its own sake — it is about enabling development teams to deliver value faster by abstracting complexity that shouldn't be every team's concern. Organizations that invest in building great internal platforms, treating them as products with real customers, will see their development velocity increase and their operational incidents decrease as developers spend more time on business logic and less on infrastructure.