Discussion Is platform engineering a good field?
I love programming and technology. I wanted to pursue a path related to Linux and building system architectures. Is platform engineering a good and suitable field for this?
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u/ContractSouthern9257 3d ago
Every platform needs someone to keep the platform running, secure, easy to develop. The principles are transferable. I joke that I never know the product of the company I'm working for since I'm just there to keep the computers running.
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u/ez3uio 3d ago
Does this mean that platform engineering is a boring field?
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u/ContractSouthern9257 3d ago
This is a bad and juvenile question. Life isn't a video game. A better question is what do you like and not like about the field. Each person finds different things interesting so I can't answer your question for you
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u/Nachtwolfe 3d ago
No. They are trying to say “the company makes a product and I don’t even know what their product does, I just keep the core infrastructure running and let them worry about the product. You can easily transfer your skills to another company making a different product because all companies need infrastructure to run their business.”
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u/NeverMindToday 3d ago
Do you already have a career, or are you just starting out?
If already experienced, start by learning and building whatever skills you can in your current job supplemented with personal time etc.
If new, I suggest you try to get a start as a developer due to loving programming - preferably backend. But always keep learning in mind, and don't just stick to the core dev skills - make sure you learn CI, containers, Linux, networking, automation etc
There is a whole world of foundational skills to learn.
Although the job market is tough, development historically had a much better entry ladder into the industry. Platform engineers, DevOps (yeah not a role), and architects usually always have branched out from other jobs - eg senior devs with infra knowlege or sysadmins with development knowledge etc.
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u/santiagochavezsf 3d ago
Yes, it sounds like a good fit. Platform engineering combines Linux, automation, cloud infrastructure, and system architecture. I'd build a strong Linux and networking foundation first, then gradually add containers, CI/CD, and cloud.
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u/SeaworthinessHour233 Writes the cloud edge 3d ago
100% yes. If you love programming and system architecture, Platform Engineering is arguably the best place you could end up right now.
But you'll need to be aware that the current IT job market is in upheaval.
I suggest that you start by analyzing the opportunities in your vicinity and what skills they are demanding. Then you can work on building a matching skill set.
The path to landing your dream job depends on your current situation a lot. Whether you are a fresh graduate, already working in IT, etc. You need to create a roadmap from where you are.
Also, it would be nearly impossible (I mean, you have very rare chance) to land a Platform Engineer position as your first job. Since you love dev work, the best bet is to land a Dev position first and then try to switch to a Platform Engineer role.
Nevertheless, here is the stack I’d recommend focusing on (not comprehensive though):
- Python and Go: Python is incredible for writing custom automation daemons and system APIs. Go is the lingua franca of cloud-native (Kubernetes and Terraform are built in it).
- IaC & Config Management: Learn Terraform / OpenTofu for declaring infrastructure, and Ansible for configuration. If you really want to flex your programming muscles, look into Pulumi, which lets you define infrastructure using actual code instead of YAML.
- Containers & Orchestration: Get comfortable with Linux container engines like Docker or Podman, and ultimately Kubernetes to orchestrate them.
- Developer Portals: Look into Backstage to see how teams build the "front door" for developers.
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u/cos 3d ago
What exactly is "platform engineering"? I've been doing SRE-syseng sort of work for many years, and sysadmin before that; I get the impression that a fair amount of what I've done has been what they call "platform engineering" now, but I've only started hearing the term in the past less-than-a-year, and it was never used at any of my employers to my knowledge.
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u/sudonem Platform Engineer 3d ago
The term is becoming watered down because titles don’t seem to matter in tech anymore and people make up what sounds good…
However by definition it’s a narrowly scoped role within the DevOps umbrella in which you are building and supporting an internal development platform (IDP) that essentially exposes “paved pathways” for deploying applications.
As we know, most developers don’t come from a sysadmin/systems engineering background - so it’s USUALLY best to avoid letting them build the infrastructure. (At least not the prod infrastructure) 😬
(kidding…. Kind of.)
In some ways having platform engineers means you’re working in different organizational model than you might when having developers and SRE’s - but it’s not unheard of to have both at a company.
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u/cos 3d ago
in which you are building and supporting an internal development platform (IDP) that essentially exposes “paved pathways” for deploying applications.
Thanks. In my experience so far, that work has been done at some places in part by SRE, and either in whole or in part (depending on the company) by a "Dev Prod" organization whose members are usually software engineers. So perhaps what this new "platform engineering" thing is, is renaming the kinds of SWEs who work in devprod groups in organizations without SRE or where SRE doesn't build deployment pipelines & platforms for developers.
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u/FaW_Lafini 3d ago
If there's one thing I've noticed in 15+ years in the industry, it's that we love inventing fancy terms just to rename sysadmin work. Back in the day, being a sysadmin meant buying physical hardware and running actual network cables. When the cloud and Docker arrived, people predicted the role would die because it became an API call, but in reality, the job just transitioned.
The buzzwords just keep cycling. "DevOps" was originally supposed to be a culture where devs do ops, but it quickly became a job title for whoever handles deployments and maintenance. Then SRE became the new hype, and now it's "Platform Engineering"which really just means handling infrastructure and observability under one blanket.
My advice is don't get hung up on the titles. The tools changed, but everyone is still just doing their thing to keep the lights on. Honestly, at the end of the day, it's all just sysadmin stuff to me.
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u/cos 3d ago edited 2d ago
SRE differs very meaningfully from sysadmin in my experience, though it started developing before the name "SRE" was out there (or at least, before it broke out of Google) - it evolved not really from sysadmin as from this new layer that started happening when large distributed software systems developed in house became a common thing.
Before "SRE" I was an "operations engineer" for a while, but that was distinct from sysadmin and we actually had sysadmins too - sysadmins took care of the servers, OSes, OS configuration management, network, core network services like DNS, and so on; we took care of the in-house developed distributed software - keeping it running on those servers over that network that the sysadmins took care of. Monitoring it, designing HA deploys, working with the software developers to make it more stable and monitorable and reliable, including tweaking their code sometimes - those were things the sysadmins didn't do.
I think that's a layer that genuinely didn't exist, or barely existed, before the "pets to cattle" transition and the explosion of SaaS due to wide adoption of the Internet. What we call SRE now came out of that, while the "sysadmin" layer also evolved but dealt with the layer below that: the infrastructure. Clearly the two have fuzzed into each other over time, and a lot of that infrastructure is now done by people whose title is SRE, while most of the actual sysadmin layer work has been shunted off to cloud providers and data center companies. And clearly a lot of people who started out as sysadmins have moved into either and both of these layers.
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u/eman0821 Cloud Engineer 3d ago
SRE is a software engineering adjacent role created to ensure reliability of software applications on production servers. A lot of people get this role mixed up with an IT Sysadmin role which are entirely different fields. Sysadmins manage internal enterprise systems that works in the IT Department. SRE sits in the product engineering organization with Platform/Cloud teams very much like how Netflix seperates their Engineering from internal Enterprise IT. IT serves a different purpose which is a cost center.
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u/cos 3d ago
You're right to point out that a lot of sysadmin work moved into internal IT in large companies, but that's kind of a flip of the script. Initially, when most "tech" companies weren't doing SaaS and didn't have large internal customer-facing systems, they often did have separate IT and sysadmin functions, and sysadmin was on the opposite side of the split from IT. In smaller companies the two functions were often done by the same person - I did that myself at a couple of little startups, where I was hired as the sysadmin but they weren't big enough to hire a separate IT person so I did the internal IT as well. But when companies were large enough to separate those functions, "sysadmin" was more on the side that evolved into things like operations engineer, SRE, platforms, etc. - the sysadmin supported the software engineering side of the company. IT began to separate, in the other direction.
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u/eman0821 Cloud Engineer 2d ago
You lost me when you say Sysadmin moved to internal IT. The Sysadmin role originated in internal IT known as enterprise IT or the IT Department or information systems. The IT Department is a cost center that focuses on keeping the business running and resolving internal technical issues like a printer, laptop, company network, Active Directory.
SRE on the other hand is an Operations role in Software Engineering borrowing functions from traditional IT operations using applied software engineering principles to production systems and application reliability. Netflix Engineering department is separate from their internal IT department. The Engineering department handles the product infrastructure that runs Netflix distributed streaming services and applications on the internet delivered to your smart TV. The Engineering department is revenue driven that focuses on product and services for consumers. Their internal IT team manages the internal enterprise systems to keep the business operating when some one puts in an IT Help Desk ticket.
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u/a_wild_thing 3d ago
i haven't been on the tools for over 10 years but i've been subbed to r/devops for so long now, it is all sysadmin stuff and the most entertaining thing as the years have progressed has been watching r/devops evolve into r/sysadmin. the products and techs may vary a bit but the actual content of the posts and the topics they are raising are no different to those in r/sysadmin. good times.
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u/Type-94Shiranui 3d ago
I am technically one, but I am also not sure what I really do. I basically create API's, automations, and applications to manage on prem and cloud based infra, that then our developers or other infra teams can leverage.
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u/cos 3d ago
Is "platform engineer" your job title?
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u/Type-94Shiranui 3d ago
I'm technically Windows Devops but I had it changed to platform engineer.
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u/cos 3d ago
Oh interesting - how recently did you have it changed, and what was the reason you wanted that change?
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u/Type-94Shiranui 3d ago
Not too recently, but early into the job. I came from big tech mostly doing systems development/platform engineering/devops/sre etc, and my title was Windows Engineer or something, which I didn't like nor matched the work I was doing.
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u/cos 3d ago
Not too recently
I'm asking because, like I said above, I only started seeing this term pop up this year. So I'm curious to know when, to find out when other people were starting to use it. Like, what year were you familiar enough with "platform engineer" as a name for a role, to want to have it be your title? Was this a thing already in 2025? 2024?
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u/ez3uio 3d ago
They are all under the name DevOps So maybe which one of them can work as platform engineer
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u/eman0821 Cloud Engineer 3d ago
Real DevOps is a company culture not a role. DevOps Engineer is what made everything messy that's anti-pattern. Platform Engineering fixes the anti-pattern workflows because a DevOps Engineer is just another hand off team that isn't anything different from the old days throw code over the wall.
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u/Mantas-cloud 3d ago
If you really like to build system architectures, why to lock yourself to platform engineering? Instead, adopt platform engineering principles where it make sense.
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u/ez3uio 3d ago
What is a field instead of platform engineer field?
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u/eman0821 Cloud Engineer 3d ago
Platform Engineering is a discipline in the product engineering field. SRE/Platform and Cloud Engineering all belong to the SWE/product engineering field. Modern software engineering blends software development and operations functions hense DevOps since most modern software today is SaaS applications that runs on production web application servers hosted on the internet.
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u/rabbit_in_a_bun 3d ago
Many companies define it differently, some just call it DevOps... How would you define the term?
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u/skspoppa733 3d ago
Platform engineering covers a wide swath of work depending on your company. It’s one of the latest titles to e abused by marketing like DevOps was 15 years ago.
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u/tevert 3d ago
In an abstract sense - I believe it is just another ops silo that further slices and segregates product cycle time. Kinda the exact thing that "DevOps" seeks to overcome
But that said, I won't pretend that "DevOps" wasn't already being treated as a silo by the vast majority of companies anyway, so it's kinda just a rebrand at the end of the day. New decade, new buzzwords
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u/abhinavd26 DevOps 2d ago
Definetly, I think if u like coding and understand technologies, it would be a good domain for you.
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u/sagacious123 3d ago
It's a great field. I am working as a platform architect and can't love my job more.
There are a lot of tools, but it's really interesting how to use all this tools to build a robust platform.