Perspective · Platform Engineering
Platform engineering, without the cult.
Golden paths, IDPs, and Terraform-as-product -- without pretending it solves problems it does not.
By DM Cyber Solutions · 2026
The pitch
"Platform engineering" is the 2024-2026 re-brand of internal tooling. The pitch: turn your DevOps and SRE teams into product teams, build an Internal Developer Platform (IDP), expose golden paths to application teams, and let everyone ship faster.
The pitch is largely correct. The execution is where most organizations get burned.
Three patterns that work
- Treat IaC as the platform product, not the tool. The valuable thing is not "we use Terraform" -- it is "an app team can request a new environment with one PR and get production-ready scaffolding in 20 minutes." That requires module discipline, golden-path templates, and ruthless deprecation of the snowflake paths.
- Start from one user, not one platform. Pick a single app team and build the paved road they need this quarter. Then a second team. Then a third. Generalize after three concrete users, not before. Most failed IDPs were generalized from zero.
- Observability and identity come first. A golden path that ships a workload without standard logs, metrics, and SSO is not a golden path; it is a future incident. The boring foundational platform pieces matter more than the dashboard your IDP exposes.
Three patterns to skip
- Backstage as the answer to a question no one asked. Backstage is a fine catalog and a poor developer experience. Adopt it when you have something to put in it, not because the keynote was good.
- "Self-service everything." Self-service is a feature, not a goal. The cost of building, securing, and maintaining a self-service path is enormous. Reserve it for workflows you run more than monthly.
- One-size IDP across business units. A platform that serves a regulated OT environment and a SaaS app team is two platforms duct-taped together. Pick one charter.
The honest scorecard
The metrics we have seen actually move when a platform program is healthy:
- Time to provision a new environment (hours, not days)
- % of workloads on the golden path (target: 80% within 18 months)
- Drift detection coverage (% of resources under IaC reconciliation)
- Self-reported developer satisfaction (DORA-style survey, quarterly)
The metrics that do not matter as much as people pretend:
- Number of templates in the catalog
- Number of integrations with the IDP
- Number of plugins authored
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