In recent years, the conversation around software development and infrastructure management has shifted from DevOps to a newer term: platform engineering. While these two concepts share similarities, they also serve distinct purposes within modern tech organizations.
So, what’s the difference between DevOps and platform engineering? And how do these roles intersect?
Core Responsibilities in DevOps
- Continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD): Automating the build, test and deployment process ensures that code is integrated frequently and you can deploy it quickly and reliably.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Using tools like Terraform or Ansible, DevOps engineers manage infrastructure through code, enabling faster provisioning and greater consistency across environments.
- Monitoring and feedback: Continuous monitoring of applications and infrastructure helps to ensure systems are performing as expected and provides feedback loops for improvement.
- Collaboration and communication: DevOps fosters a collaborative environment between developers and operations teams, which helps reduce silos and promotes shared ownership of software and systems.
What Is Platform Engineering?
Platform engineering takes a more targeted approach than DevOps. While DevOps focuses on improving collaboration between teams and automating workflows, platform engineering is more about building an internal development platform that developers use to build, deploy and run their applications.
Platform engineers create the tools, systems and infrastructure that other developers can use. Their goal is to reduce the cognitive load for developers by abstracting the complexities of infrastructure, cloud services and deployment pipelines. This allows developers to focus on writing code without worrying about how it’s deployed, secured or monitored.
Core responsibilities in platform engineering include the following.
- Building self-service platforms: Platform engineers build custom internal platforms that provide self-service capabilities for developers, allowing them to easily deploy services, databases and other resources without needing to interact with the underlying infrastructure.
- Abstracting infrastructure complexity: Creating a layer of abstraction between developers and the cloud infrastructure simplifies the development process for platform engineers. Developers no longer need to worry about the intricate details of Kubernetes, cloud provisioning or networking configurations.
- Enabling multi-cloud and on-prem deployments: Many organizations need to deploy applications across multiple cloud providers or in on-premises environments. Platform engineers create systems that abstract away the differences between these environments, making it easier to deploy applications anywhere.
- Custom tooling and automation: Platform engineers build custom tools and services that integrate seamlessly with an organization’s workflow, optimizing the development lifecycle for speed, reliability and scalability.
3 Key Differences Between DevOps and Platform Engineering
While DevOps and Platform Engineering share some common goals — like improving deployment pipelines and fostering collaboration — there are distinct differences beyond their scopes of responsibility.
1. Tools and Automation
DevOps focuses on using existing tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI, Terraform and Docker to automate and manage infrastructure. DevOps engineers might write custom scripts or use automation frameworks to streamline operations and application delivery.
Platform engineers create new tools and systems that are custom-tailored to their organization’s specific needs. They might build internal services that allow developers to register new microservices or spin up databases with a few clicks, providing a high degree of automation that’s specific to the company’s tech stack and operational requirements.
2. Developer Interaction
DevOps engineers work closely with developers, but developers still interact with many aspects of the infrastructure, such as writing CI/CD pipeline configurations or managing container orchestration. Developers may also be involved in deploying and scaling applications.
Platform engineers aim to abstract away as much of the infrastructure as possible, allowing developers to focus on writing code. The platform engineering team builds systems that handle everything from provisioning infrastructure to deploying applications, freeing developers from having to interact directly with cloud services or other complex infrastructure layers.
3. Complexity and Scale
Small to medium-sized companies can implement DevOps with relative ease. While it requires a strong understanding of tools and infrastructure, it doesn't involve building large-scale custom platforms.
Platform engineering is more often found in large enterprises with complex requirements. It is particularly useful when a company operates across multiple cloud environments or needs to support a wide variety of services and infrastructure components. The complexity of platform engineering typically exceeds that of DevOps because it involves building custom systems that can be used by entire development teams.
Should You Employ DevOps or Platform Engineering?
There is often overlap between the two roles, especially in smaller organizations. In these cases, DevOps engineers may take on some platform engineering responsibilities by building and maintaining internal tools for developers. Likewise, platform engineers will frequently rely on DevOps principles — such as continuous integration and deployment — to build the systems that enable automation.
Both roles share a common goal: streamlining the software development and deployment lifecycle. The key difference is that while DevOps engineers are typically focused on automation and collaboration, platform engineers are focused on building the tools and infrastructure that make that automation possible.
Platform engineering becomes increasingly valuable in larger, more complex organizations. For companies that need to support multi-cloud environments, manage large-scale applications or develop custom internal tooling to support hundreds of developers, platform engineering offers a way to centralize and optimize those processes.
Smaller organizations with simpler architectures, however, may not need the additional overhead of building custom platforms. In these cases, a well-established DevOps process might be sufficient to support their needs.
For smaller teams, DevOps alone may be sufficient. But as companies grow, adopting platform engineering can provide significant benefits by reducing cognitive load and optimizing development processes, especially when scaling across cloud environments or supporting large, complex applications.
