The Gartner-backed concept of platform engineering is designed to address the demand for skilled cloud computing engineers, according to DuploCloud Founder and CEO Venkat Thiruvengadam. He argues that with a "powerful platform engineering team," IT organizations don't need "a massive brain trust" of pricey cloud engineers to meet technical goals.

Platform engineers support all aspects of an organization's software development processes by building and managing underlying infrastructure, which eliminates unnecessary code tasks and cognitive load from other engineers, Thiruvengadam told SDxCentral.

According to Gartner Analyst Jeffrey Hewitt, strong platform engineering teams also support organizational agility, speed, efficiency, compliance, and safety.

The analyst firm predicted late last year that platform engineering will be a major trend impacting infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders in 2023. This coalescence of infrastructure tech like application resource management (ARM), application performance monitoring (APM), digital experience monitoring (DEM), and digital platform conductor (DPC) tools provide self-service infrastructure and deployments that build upon ideas of continuous integration and delivery, Hewitt told SDxCentral in an earlier interview.

Although platform engineers need to be skilled in technologies like Kubernetes, SQL systems, and data storage, Thiruvengadam noted soft skills are just as important to build a solid team. "It’s the soft skills that make for good platform engineers [who] are likely to remain more consistent as time passes," he explained.

Soft skills like empathy, partnership, patience, perspective, and operational focus make for an effective platform team mindset. "No matter how technology grows and what new tools arise, that mindset will continue to be a necessary component in the development of internal software infrastructure," Thiruvengadam said.

Empathy is a useful characteristic for platform engineers, even though they don't often face external customers. Platform teams need to empathize with colleagues who will eventually use what they're building. When product engineers come to platform teams with issues, for example, the latter will benefit from an empathetic understanding of the former's challenges when constructing a solution, he noted.

And "in the spirit of partnership," platform engineering teams should design "code that other engineers can easily read, understand, and employ for their specific use case," Thiruvengadam added. If an application's code is only accessible to an individual engineer, it's "virtually impossible to scale, share, and repurpose, making it a poor platform engineering tool."

Support represents yet another significant chunk of the platform engineering team's responsibilities. Most engineers don't understand every single complex infrastructure topic, leaving "a patient approach to educating engineering teams" about internal platform tools to "propel forward everyone involved," he said.

And as opposed to product teams, platform teams embark on long-term projects "with greater import in many ways," he noted. Since this type of work helps other business units operate more effectively, "platform teams need to be more dedicated than other engineers" in terms of measurable performance, efficiency, reliability, and operability.