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Are You Still Doing DevOps? Why It’s Time to Embrace Platform Engineering

Updated: Jul 31

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Back in the early days of software development, deploying a new application wasn’t just a technical task - it was a ritual - we used to wait days for a server, late-night deployments, manual configurations, and the silent hope that nothing breaks in production at 2 AM.  

That was a standard practice in the early days of DevOps-especially in a non-cloud, on-premises environment. 


Then came DevOps.

 

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Suddenly, we started talking to each other. Developers and operations stopped working on separate islands. We started using tools like Jenkins, Git, and Ansible, stitching together our own CI/CD pipelines.  


Tasks once used to take days - now can be done within minutes. 

It encouraged collaboration between developers and operations, broke down silos, and introduced continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD).  

We automated whatever we could—using shell scripts and Jenkins - and began to move faster than ever before. 

 

Instead of waiting on IT, developers could now trigger builds automatically when they push code.  

Tests ran instantly.  

Deployments were no longer Friday-night horror stories — they became routine. 

But even with automation, the underlying infrastructure was manually provisioned, inconsistent, and painfully slow to scale. 


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A Turning Point: Infrastructure as Code (IaC) 

The DevOps movement hit a major milestone with IaC—the idea that infrastructure should be defined in code, version-controlled, reviewed, and deployed just like application code. 

Instead of creating servers or databases manually, write code that does it for you.  For example, a simple Terraform script can spin up an entire environment in seconds. 


Before IaC (Manual Provisioning) 

Scenario: Provision an EC2 instance in AWS manually via UI or CLI 

# Manual process using AWS CLI 
aws ec2 run-instances \
--image-id ami-0abcd1234abcd5678 \
--instance-type t2.micro \
--key-name my-key \
--security-groups my-security-group  

🔹 Problems: 

  • No version control 

  • Prone to human error 

  • Hard to replicate environment 

  • No audit trail 

 

After IaC (Using Terraform) 

# main.tf
provider "aws" {
   region = "us-east-1"
}

resource "aws_instance" "my_ec2" {
   ami = "ami-0abcd1234abcd5678"
   instance_type = "t2.micro" 
   tags = {
     Name = "my-terraform-instance" 
   }
}  

Then you run: 

terraform init
terraform apply  

🔹 Key Benefits of Infrastructure as Code (IaC):

  • Declarative & Consistent: Define the desired infrastructure state clearly - no surprises. 

  • Version-Controlled: Track changes just like application code with Git. 

  • Reproducible & Scalable: Spin up identical environments across dev, test, and prod. 

  • Rollback-Friendly: Revert to previous infrastructure states quickly if needed. 

  • CI/CD Friendly: Seamlessly integrates into modern delivery pipelines for automation. 


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Platform Engineering: Evolution of DevOps 

Platform Engineering is the next phase of DevOps - driven by the complexity of cloud-native tools like IaC. 


Instead of each team managing their own infrastructure, platform engineers build reusable components and offer them through self-service interfaces. Developers simply fill a form or click a button, while the platform: 

  • Provisions infra using Terraform 

  • Sets up monitoring, logging and alerts 

  • Deploys via standard CI/CD workflows 

  • Enforces security policies 


No infra code needed from developers. 


This is where IaC shifts from team-level responsibility to platform-level abstraction. 


Why Platform Engineering Is on the Rise 

Modern software stacks are too complex for DevOps alone to handle efficiently. Here's why Platform Engineering is growing fast: 


  1. IaC Adoption Created New Complexity: While IaC solved environmental consistency, it also introduced new tools and learning curves. Platform teams now maintain reusable IaC modules that developers use through simple interfaces.  According to the State of DevOps Report 2023, 41% of organizations cite “too many tools and complexity” as a top barrier to DevOps maturity.  

  2. Developer Burnout:  Writing and debugging infrastructure scripts is not what most developers signed up for.  A GitLab 2023 DevSecOps survey found 43% of developers say maintaining infrastructure pipelines adds “significant cognitive load.”  

  3. Shift Left in Security: IaC enables security policies to be embedded early in the lifecycle—and platform teams can enforce them at scale.  The HashiCorp 2023 State of Cloud Strategy Survey shows 88% of orgs that adopt policy-as-code see improved security and compliance outcomes.  

  4. Internal Platforms at Scale: Big tech companies like Netflix, Spotify, and Google have led the way with fully managed internal platforms, powered by IaC and DevOps principles.  IDC predicts that by 2026, 60% of enterprises will have a dedicated platform engineering team. 


Final Thoughts: Evolve or Stall 

If you’re still doing DevOps the old way - managing pipelines per team, writing custom Terraform scripts, debugging infrastructure errors - you’re burning precious time and energy. 

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) laid the foundation.  Platform Engineering builds the house. 

By centralizing infrastructure expertise, standardizing environments and abstracting complexity, platform engineering lets developers do what they do best - build software. 


References 

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