Platform engineering

The internal foundations that let your product teams ship without re-solving infrastructure each time.

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What is it?

A platform is the paved road: the deployment pipeline, environment provisioning, observability, and security defaults that every team shares. Done well it removes the per-team infrastructure tax. Done badly it becomes a gate nobody can get through. We build the first kind.

For a technical reader

An internal developer platform is an abstraction over your cloud accounts, CI system and observability stack, exposed through templates, a CLI or a portal. The hard part is choosing the right level of abstraction: too thin and it adds a layer without removing work, too thick and teams hit a wall the moment they need something the platform did not anticipate. We prefer a paved road with visible exits, so a team can drop to the underlying primitives without abandoning the platform entirely.

Our services

Platform assessmentWhere your teams actually lose time between committing code and serving traffic, measured rather than assumed.
Golden path implementationService templates, pipelines and environment provisioning your teams can adopt on day one.
Observability baselineA consistent metrics, logging and tracing setup so every service is debuggable the same way.
Platform-as-a-product setupOwnership, versioning, support channel and roadmap, so the platform keeps being maintained.

What’s covered

Golden-path templates
Pre-wired service scaffolds so a new service starts with logging, auth and CI already correct
Environment provisioning
Self-service ephemeral environments per branch, torn down automatically
Observability stack
Metrics, structured logs and distributed traces, consistent across every service
Secrets and policy
Central secret management and policy-as-code enforced in the pipeline, not by review
Service catalogue
A register of what exists, who owns it and what it depends on

Business problems we solve

Every team solves infrastructure againFive teams, five pipelines, five logging conventions. Shared golden paths remove the duplicated effort and the inconsistency.
Onboarding takes weeksA new engineer should ship something small in days. If they cannot, the setup path is the problem.
Security review is a bottleneckReviewing every change by hand does not scale. Policy as code enforces the baseline automatically and reserves review for genuinely novel cases.
The platform team is a ticket queueIf teams must raise a ticket to get an environment, the platform is a gate. Self-service is the difference.

Our delivery approach

  1. 01
    Find the real frictionWe interview the teams who will use it and watch how they ship today. The platform is scoped around the steps that actually cost them time.
  2. 02
    Make the paved road optionalTeams adopt it because it is faster than the alternative, not because it is mandated. That constraint keeps the platform honest.
  3. 03
    Ship it as a productVersioned, documented, with a support channel and a changelog. Internal users are still users.
  4. 04
    Measure adoption, not outputSuccess is teams choosing it and lead time dropping, not the number of components delivered.

Solutions & project types

Examples of the work we take on in this area. These describe project shapes, not named client engagements.

Internal developer portalA catalogue of services with ownership, dependencies, documentation and one-click scaffolding for a new service.
Ephemeral preview environmentsA full environment per pull request, created automatically and destroyed on merge.
Standardised CI/CD templatesShared pipeline definitions with testing, scanning and deployment already wired in.
Centralised observability rolloutOne tracing and metrics standard applied across existing services incrementally.

Technologies & platforms

Orchestration

  • Kubernetes
  • Helm
  • Kustomize
  • Crossplane

Delivery

  • Argo CD
  • Flux
  • GitHub Actions
  • GitLab CI
  • Jenkins

Portal & catalogue

  • Backstage
  • Port
  • Service catalogues

Policy & secrets

  • Open Policy Agent
  • HashiCorp Vault
  • AWS Secrets Manager
  • Kyverno

Observability

  • Prometheus
  • Grafana
  • OpenTelemetry
  • Datadog
  • Loki
Learn this field

Where to start with platform engineering.

Secondary to the work itself, but genuinely useful if you are building the skill. Every link goes to official documentation or an official channel.

Beginner

  • Understand what a CI pipeline does, step by step
  • Containers and image layering
  • Basic Kubernetes objects
  • YAML and templating without fear
  • Read a Terraform plan and predict what it will do

Intermediate

  • GitOps: declarative state and reconciliation
  • Helm charts and environment overlays
  • Secret management patterns
  • Prometheus metric types and useful alerts
  • Designing a service template others will adopt

Advanced

  • Platform API design and the right abstraction level
  • Multi-tenancy and isolation in shared clusters
  • Policy as code and admission control
  • Measuring developer experience and lead time
  • Running an internal product: versioning, deprecation, support

Certifications

  • Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
  • Certified Argo Project Associate (CAPA)
  • HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate
  • Prometheus Certified Associate (PCA)

Practice projects

  • Build a service template that scaffolds logging, health checks and CI
  • Set up GitOps so a merge reconciles the cluster without a deploy script
  • Create an ephemeral environment per pull request
  • Write an admission policy that rejects containers running as root
  • Instrument three services with the same tracing standard and compare traces
FAQs

Questions we get asked.

How many teams justify a platform?

Below roughly three or four delivery teams the overhead usually outweighs the saving, and shared conventions plus a good template are enough. The case strengthens as duplication grows.

Should the platform be mandatory?

We advise against it. If teams only use it because they must, nobody is measuring whether it is actually good. Make it the fastest route and adoption tells you the truth.

Do we need Backstage?

Not necessarily. A portal helps once there are enough services that nobody can hold the map in their head. Before that, a well-maintained README and good templates do more.

Who owns the platform afterwards?

That is decided during the engagement, not after. A platform without a named owner degrades quickly, so ownership and a support model are part of the delivery.

Engineering

Related services.

Cloud-native developmentServices built to run on cloud infrastructure from the first commit, not lifted onto it later.API & systems integrationMaking systems that were never designed to talk to each other exchange data reliably.Application modernizationMoving legacy applications forward without a rewrite that never lands.Quality & test automationA test suite teams trust enough to deploy on, rather than one they routinely skip.
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