Comparison
Platform engineeringvsPlatform team
Platform engineering
a team's output is not a feature but the thing forty other engineers use to ship features safely.
Treating internal infrastructure capability as a product built by a dedicated team for other engineers. It exists because the alternatives both fail at scale: every team solving deployment, secrets and observability separately, or a gatekeeping operations team that becomes a queue. Its characteristic failure is building a platform nobody adopts, which is why adoption rather than completeness is the metric that matters.
Full entry →Platform team
another team's product is your deploy pipeline, and you are their customer rather than their ticket queue.
A team whose users are other engineers, providing self-service capabilities that reduce what a product team must know. The distinction that matters is self-service: a platform team that must be involved in every use of its platform is a bottleneck with a nicer name. It succeeds when product teams choose to use it because it is easier than the alternative, not because it is mandated.
Full entry →