Platform Engineering

Ship without tickets.
Guardrails, not gatekeepers.

Internal platforms and golden paths that let developers ship without filing tickets: self-service environments, standardized templates, and guardrails instead of gatekeepers.

Developer Experience Problems

🎫 Ticket-Driven Development

Need a new environment? File a ticket. Need a database? File a ticket. Developers wait days for things that should take minutes.

🎨 Snowflake Services

Every team does things differently. Different CI/CD, different monitoring, different patterns. No consistency, no reuse.

📚 Documentation Debt

"Ask Steve, he knows how to deploy" — tribal knowledge instead of clear, self-service paths to production.

⏳ Slow Onboarding

New engineers take weeks to ship their first feature. Too much context to absorb, too many systems to learn.

Platform Engineering Services

Internal Developer Portal

A single pane of glass for developers. Service catalog, documentation, runbooks, and self-service actions.

  • Backstage implementation
  • Port / Cortex / OpsLevel
  • Service catalog design
  • TechDocs integration

Golden Paths

Paved roads to production. Standardized templates that make the right way the easy way.

  • Service templates (cookiecutter)
  • Scaffolding automation
  • CI/CD templates
  • IaC module libraries

Self-Service Infrastructure

Developers provision what they need, when they need it. Guardrails ensure compliance without tickets.

  • Environment provisioning
  • Database self-service
  • Namespace/project creation
  • Budget-bounded resources

Developer Workflows

Optimize the inner loop. Fast local development, quick feedback, minimal context switching.

  • Local development environments
  • Remote development (Codespaces, Gitpod)
  • Preview environments per PR
  • Hot reload & fast iteration

Platform APIs & Automation

Expose platform capabilities as APIs. Let teams integrate and extend.

  • Platform API design
  • Terraform providers
  • Custom Kubernetes operators
  • ChatOps integrations

Platform Team Enablement

Build internal platform engineering capability. We help you hire, structure, and level up your platform team.

  • Platform team structure
  • Hiring & job specs
  • Training & workshops
  • Platform roadmap development

Platform Engineering Results

2 days → 2 hours

New service onboarding

Implemented Backstage with golden path templates. New services go from idea to deployed in 2 hours instead of 2 days.

Backstage · Templates · Self-service

-80%

Platform team ticket load

Self-service infrastructure reduced DevOps ticket volume by 80%. Team now focuses on platform improvements, not ticket queues.

Self-service · Automation · IaC

1 week

New engineer time-to-ship

With clear golden paths and documentation, new engineers ship their first PR to production in their first week.

Onboarding · Documentation · DX

Platform Engineering FAQ

When should we invest in platform engineering?

When developer friction is slowing down the business. Signs: long lead times for new services, DevOps team is a bottleneck, inconsistent practices across teams, slow onboarding. Usually makes sense at 20+ engineers.

Backstage or something else?

Backstage (Spotify) is the open-source leader — highly customizable, strong community. Commercial options (Port, Cortex, OpsLevel) are easier to start with. We recommend based on your team size and customization needs.

How do you balance self-service with security?

Policy as code. Resources are provisioned through templates that enforce security standards. Developers get freedom within guardrails — they can't accidentally create public S3 buckets or over-permissive IAM roles.

Do we need a dedicated platform team?

Eventually, yes. You can start with DevOps/SRE folks spending part-time on platform work. At ~50 engineers, a dedicated platform team (2-4 people) usually pays off. We can help you structure this.

Ready to build your platform?
Start with a free assessment.

We'll assess your current developer experience, identify the highest-impact improvements, and help you build a platform roadmap.

Get Your Free Platform Assessment