Why Platform Engineering?
Platform engineering is the discipline of designing, building, and operating the shared infrastructure and tooling that software development teams rely on – so they can focus on building their product rather than managing the platform it runs on.
As software organizations scale, the gap between writing application code and operating it in production grows wider. Platform engineering closes that gap by treating internal infrastructure as a product, with developers as its users.
The Problem It Solves
Modern applications run on complex stacks: Kubernetes clusters, CI/CD pipelines, databases, observability tooling, secrets management, networking, and cloud accounts. Without a platform team, every development team ends up solving these problems independently – inconsistently, redundantly, and often insecurely.
Platform engineering introduces a shared, self-service layer between application developers and the underlying infrastructure. This layer encodes best practices, compliance requirements, and operational knowledge into reusable building blocks – often called golden paths – so teams can ship faster without cutting corners.
What a Platform Engineering Team Does
A platform engineering team builds and operates the Internal Developer Platform (IDP) – the set of tools, APIs, and abstractions that product teams consume:
- Self-service infrastructure: developers provision databases, environments, and services without filing tickets
- Golden paths: opinionated, pre-approved workflows for building, deploying, and operating services
- Automation and GitOps: infrastructure state defined as code, continuously reconciled
- Observability and reliability: shared monitoring, alerting, and SLO tooling available to all teams
- Security by default: compliance and security controls enforced at the platform level, not left to individual teams
The platform itself is treated as a product – with a roadmap, SLOs, and internal customers who give feedback and drive its evolution.
Platform Engineering and Cloud Native
Platform engineering is the operational discipline that makes Cloud Native work at scale. Cloud Native technologies like Kubernetes, containers, and microservices provide the building blocks; platform engineering is how organizations actually manage and operate them coherently across multiple teams and products.
In practice, Kubernetes is the most common foundation for modern internal developer platforms – its extensibility through operators and custom resources makes it well suited to encoding platform logic.
Why It Matters for Your Business
Platform engineering accelerates software delivery without sacrificing reliability or security. It reduces the cognitive load on your development teams, eliminates duplicated infrastructure work, and creates a consistent operational baseline across the organization.
The core promise: you build your product. A platform engineering team designs and runs the platform it runs on.
VSHN and Platform Engineering
Since 2014, VSHN has helped software companies, enterprises, and public sector organizations across Switzerland and beyond adopt and operate cloud native platforms – so their development teams can focus on building products rather than managing infrastructure.
We are Switzerland’s first Kubernetes Certified Service Provider and operate platforms on public cloud, private infrastructure, and sovereign environments.
Our solutions cover the full lifecycle of a cloud native platform – from initial architecture and setup through ongoing operations and continuous evolution.
Our managed services – from APPUiO, Managed OpenShift and Managed Kubernetes to the Application Catalog – are the building blocks organizations use to assemble their internal developer platform without starting from scratch.
Servala adds a sovereign app store for cloud native services – for enterprises, software vendors, and cloud providers that need to deliver services in a controlled and compliant way.
Contact us
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