Understanding the Mindset Shift in Platform Engineering

For organizations that have long relied on traditional IT, transitioning to platform engineering is much like charting unfamiliar waters. It's not just about adopting a new approach; it's about completely changing the philosophy of how we see our roles.

Historically, automation in IT was a mechanism to simplify operations' work. The mantra was clear: design tools that make ops tasks smoother and get dev teams to use them. The underlying philosophy? The ops team bore the ultimate responsibility, and these tools, when adopted by others, served to lighten the ops team's load.

But platform engineering has flipped this narrative.

Now, the focus isn't about creating tools to lighten our load. Instead, it’s about designing and operating a platform that reduces cognitive load for others. The platform team is no longer just another ops team, it is a dev team providing services to other dev teams. It operates a platform, ensuring it serves as the bedrock for development teams to build upon without friction. If there's an issue with pipelines or logging systems, that’s a challenge for the platform team. But when the application faces a hiccup? That's where the app team, equipped with tools tailored to their needs, takes the call.

It's a profound shift from self-centric tooling to outward-centric support. Our job is no longer to simplify our tasks but to be enablers, ensuring others can seamlessly do theirs.