Newsletter September 2025: Platform Engineering

This month I discovered the term Platform Engineering. In particular, I watched this video series from the Modern Software Engineering channel. I also found the article What is platform engineering? from Microsoft to provide a good description.

I like the concept of platform engineering because it allows teams to take full responsibility for their software while not having to be operations experts. Instead they can target a higher-level platform.

I remember reading about Heroku many years ago. With it, people were able to deploy their Ruby on Rails (and perhaps other) applications without any knowledge of web servers or infrastructure. Heroku raised the abstraction and made it possible for more people to put things in production. Of course that comes at a cost of less flexibility. In some situations that is not worth it. But in other situations it makes things so much easier.

The Heroku approach seemed to have gone out of style for a while. But now it seems to be popular again under the name of Platform Engineering. I look forward to following development in this space.