[philipkimmey]

Well, thought I’d share my personal experience and the focus areas of our platform engineering team, since the DevOps/SRE definitions are more-or-less correct.

I’ve seen Platform Engineering take various different forms, but it’s current incarnation is split into 2 teams:

1. Developer Productivity. Ownership of quality, efficiency, and developer tools. A recent example project was improving the quality of our test data capabilities to make manual testing easier/more consistent.

2. Unified Client Platform. This team owns our design system and is the primary owner of our effort to unify on React.js/React Native, though a lot of the heavy lifting is distributed around the team.

(I mostly wanted to weigh in since at a mid-sized company at least, we’re not interested in building our own PaaS… k8s or Lambda is fine for that. Instead, we want to ensure developer onboarding is painless and anything specific to us is easily understood - the bulk of the surface area should be best-in-class 3rd party tools or ideally popular OSS frameworks.)