Platform engineering is a DevSecOps concept that enables development teams to tackle their everyday workflows with greater efficiency and autonomy — typically through specialized tooling, dedicated infrastructure, self-service software, and a heaping helping of automation.
Overall, platform engineering helps teams bring solutions to life faster and respond more rapidly to internal needs. It can help alleviate the mental load of managing numerous, concurrent development tasks while making collaboration easier. Platform engineering also boosts regulatory compliance and reduces costs while helping technical teams meet business objectives.
These elements comprise the intersection between organizational success and positive developer experiences. Platform engineering also welcomes contributions from other teams, such as IT and operations, during the development lifecycle.
How does platform engineering work?
Crafting a platform engineering strategy first requires a thorough understanding of your internal development processes — what works well, what needs improvement, what vendor platforms are currently used, and how critical cross-platform compatibility is. Auditing each stage of your internal development pipeline is crucial to creating stronger links in that chain while reducing opportunities for human error, roadblocks, or security vulnerabilities.
Platform engineering is especially important in a cloud-native context. It helps teams manage distributed deployments through internal, vendor-agnostic middleware (including internal development platforms) that bridge the gap between applications, networking components, and clouds. Such a strategy helps teams develop faster and more securely through eliminating common sources of friction. Most recently, generative AI has also become an indispensable tool for accelerating development and management.
Modern DevOps-driven CI/CD pipelines have grown progressively longer as teams have been tasked with larger workloads. After all, just one small engineering team can support hundreds or even thousands of development projects. Teams can shorten this software development lifecycle by consolidating tooling and boosting productivity — thus reducing strain on internal engineers and any fragmentation that may later introduce technical debt within an organization.
There are two different pathways teams can take to pursue platform engineering. The first involves more manual setup work to build the specific tools you need from scratch, in house. While this is possible for smaller organizations and theoretically gives teams more flexibility, it's harder to scale up effectively. One tool that's built for one purpose might not mesh well with another — and if it does, the development effort can be expensive and time consuming. Plus, not all teams have the skills or motivation to create something from scratch.
The second involves creating a blueprint for internal infrastructure needs, then shopping around for battle-tested tools (either open or closed source) with robust features and integrations. Such an approach can quickly yield productivity benefits and enable simplified management if those pieces fit together seamlessly. Trusted software built for the enterprise is designed with massive scalability in mind, with the power to accommodate more teams, internal systems, and associated toolchains.
In any case, platform engineering focuses on finding the most efficient path forward without siloing technical teams. Centralization is the goal — or having one toolchain in which everyone has a home, while using fine-grained controls (such as RBAC) to delegate specific roles or permissions as needed.
What are the benefits of platform engineering?
Platform engineering helps technical teams in numerous ways:
A shared and cohesive tooling strategy helps teams work together better, shorten the development pipeline, and thus move faster.
Centralized and secure platforms help prevent abuse, attacks, and intrusion while improving compliance.
Standardized environments are more accessible and contribute to smoother deployments.
Tailored infrastructure setups can reduce costs through efficiency — both in terms of productivity gains, and in resource usage.
Self-service software based on templating, consistent configuration, and automation can sharply boost scalability across an organization and its services.
A well-designed platform is more enjoyable to work with and increases buy-in with team members, curtailing the prevalence of shadow IT.
The process of developing an internal platform encourages — if not requires — teams to consider user experiences and journeys when designing internal systems.
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Does HAProxy support platform engineering?
Yes! HAProxy One is the world's fastest application delivery and security platform. It enables organizations of all sizes to manage, secure, and observe all their application traffic — in any environment — with a unified platform.
As part of HAProxy One, HAProxy Fusion Control Plane powers much of this by enabling full-lifecycle management, observability, and automation of multi-cluster, multi-cloud, and multi-team HAProxy Enterprise deployments for your DevSecOps teams. Additionally, HAProxy Fusion gives teams load-balancing-as-a-service (LBaaS) functionality to make self-service application delivery more efficient for App teams, while offloading load balancer management from Ops teams. HAProxy One also offers unified mesh solutions to easily and seamlessly connect services distributed across clouds.
To learn more about HAProxy and platform engineering, check out our automation and self-service solution or our HAProxyConf 2025 presentation, How to Take Control of Your HAProxy Fleet.