Platform Engineering’s True Value Is in Application Development
The ultimate goal of platform engineering is not straightforward and deserves nuanced consideration. Platform engineering is a discipline, within the cloud native world, that serves as an aid to streamline workflows and ensure consistency. But that’s not all.
While it is true that platform engineering is fundamental to building internal tools that optimize operations and facilitate platform teams, its ultimate impact extends further than managing complex sets of organizational and technical practices.
In essence: Platform engineering is not an end in itself, because the core value of platform engineering initiatives lies in application development.
Understanding that platform engineering pursues a further goal and internal developer platforms (IDPs) serve a broader scope, means to acknowledge that the platform itself is a conduit and application development is the true enabler of value generation, distribution and maintenance.
IDP: Your Self-Service Foundation To Boost Productivity
The shift from traditional, often cumbersome, infrastructure provisioning to a self-service model is somehow revolutionary for application development. Historically, developers have faced significant delays and friction due to heavy reliance on other teams even for basic infrastructure and operational needs.
IDPs have greatly eased developers from most of their cognitive burden, allowing them to perform with unmatched speed and focus on innovation, business logic and distribution of value rather than underlying complexities.
Basically, IDPs turn infrastructure resources, tools and services into highly functional and automated components to get the job done faster, smoother and more securely. The developer becomes a craftsman entitled to build applications, relying on a solid foundation with ready-made tools.
The gateway to such a foundation is the internal developer portal: a consolidated and intuitive interface that gives seamless access to platform capabilities and resources with service discoverability, documentation, scaffolding templates and customizable dashboards.
Developers can single-handedly provision and configure their own resources by following predetermined best practices and recommendations, while pre-approved tools and configurations ensure total alignment with security, architecture and compliance guidelines that developers and even AI agents can actively use.
Accelerate The Entire Development Life Cycle
Platforms aim to consolidate and industrialize the end-to-end software production process within a single hub, granting velocity, governance and compliance at every stage beyond just backend or API provisioning. Here are some examples:
- A developer wants to create a new microservice and expose it via an API endpoint. Instead of manually configuring routing, load balancing and security policies, they use the platform’s self-service interface to define the new service and its endpoint. The platform automatically provisions the necessary infrastructure, sets up routing via an API gateway and applies default security measures, making the service immediately accessible and secure.
- A frontend developer needs to build a complex, modular user interface by integrating multiple components and legacy systems. Rather than coding everything from scratch, the developer can use a no-code/low-code tool. This allows visually assembling pages by dragging and dropping pre-built components (tables, forms, charts) and integrating micro-frontends built with different technologies or even legacy applications through iFrames. The platform accelerates frontend creation, ensures consistency and reduces integration complexity, enabling faster delivery of a polished user experience without deep frontend framework expertise.
- AI-native platforms with integrated AI assistants and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers can streamline processes even more, enabling multiple use cases and bringing in diverse roles. A chief information security officer can ask the assistant to generate an audit report for all configuration changes in a specific project over the last month, including who made each change and when. The MCP server is the middleware that allows context-aware interactions between AI systems and enterprise live data, enforcing monitoring and compliance without manual efforts.
From Productivity To Accelerated Business Results
The platform’s value is directly proportional to the speed at which developers can release new features and solutions. Reduced cognitive load for developers means they can concentrate on creative problem-solving and efficient implementation of business logic.
Think about a self-service film studio fully equipped with state-of-the-art cameras, lighting and sound stages, all readily accessible. Easily, the true value is not the studio itself, but the blockbuster films (applications) that the directors and crew (developers) can now produce seamlessly, faster and at a higher quality, because they have immediate, on-demand access to every tool they need, significantly boosting their creative output and productivity.
In essence, a modern manufacturing assembly line — the developer platform — is valuable not because of its sophisticated machines, but because it enables the production of finished products, or developed applications, at an unprecedented rate, making the company meet market demand and grow.
The impact of a self-service approach is actually measurable: This velocity translates to business metrics like reduced time to market, increased deployment frequency, faster experimentation and a quicker response to competitor actions. Therefore, benefits are substantial for both developers and organizations: Complete autonomy, infrastructure and operational standardization, accelerated deployments, scalable automation and enhanced productivity, accelerate the software development life cycle (SDLC )and increase the return on investment (ROI).
Self-Service App Development: Discover, Compose, Reuse
Self-service application development is achievable through modular approaches such as composability.
If the internal developer portal is the interactive veil bridging the actionable software and hidden assets, the software catalog is the foundational registry to discover and organize these assets. Composable platforms often feature a prominent marketplace, which is a more visible and manifested counterpart of the software catalog and typically includes templates, plugins, APIs, data bundles and applications.
At the heart of composability, there’s the principle of assembling new solutions or modifying existing ones. This approach not only speeds up the SDLC but also offers greater resource visibility to other functional areas, minimizing redundancy.
Intelligent dashboards and AI agentic workflows can significantly enhance the entire process, assisting developers with routine tasks and debugging, providing context-aware iterations tailored to specific needs or supporting informed business decisions.
Developers as Customers, Value as the Outcome
Platform engineering isn’t an end in itself. Its core premise lies in a strategic initiative whose primary purpose is to help developers build applications.
Somehow, the platform acts as a product and its developers perform as active customers. But a platform can be a successful product only if its infrastructure remains invisible to the developers. In other words, a curated ecosystem that allows developers to focus only on solving business problems and producing value for the organization.
Platform engineering realizes tangible ROI when it directly empowers application developers and product teams, triggering a virtuous cycle of cost savings, risk reduction and increased revenue.
Organizations that successfully implement a holistic internal platform might have more possibilities to ensure long-term growth and innovation, becoming more agile and responsive to market demands.
By prioritizing the developer experience and equipping software engineers with robust, self-service tools, platform engineering directly fuels the engine of business value and market competitiveness.
