Scaling Securely: How Platform Engineering Supports Developer Velocity

Have you ever noticed friction between your infrastructure and development teams? It’s a common challenge across many businesses. Developers want to move quickly, while infrastructure teams are focused on stability and security. 

This tug-of-war often leads to bottlenecks, delays, and frustration for everyone involved. 

But what if developers could deploy their own services, as and when they need them? Platform Engineering—sometimes referred to as Platform Ops—is a way to make this possible. 

Recently, our Principal Architect, Elliott Leighton-Woodruff, hosted a webinar exploring how Platform Engineering can solve these challenges. 

We’d definitely recommend watching it if you’re interested in this topic—you’ll get a detailed explanation of the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of this new way of working. Below, you can read on for some key insights and takeaways. 

Does this sound familiar? Your developers are pushing to launch exciting new features, but they’re constantly hitting roadblocks with infrastructure requirements. Meanwhile, your infrastructure team is trying to maintain security and stability while feeling pressured to move faster than they’re comfortable with. 

This disconnect leads to real business problems: 

• Development projects taking weeks instead of days 
• Infrastructure teams becoming bottlenecks 
• Inconsistent deployments leading to stability issues
• Developers going rogue and running their own “shadow IT” 
• Increased security risks as standards are bypassed 

According to a Microsoft Dev Productivity Survey, “Delays introduced by external teams, like platform or security, are one of the biggest contributors to developers’ ‘bad days’.” This impact is quantifiable—the Google Cloud DevOps Research and Assessment team’s 2024 report found that “teams relying on internal development platforms see up to an 8% drop in throughput.” Surely there’s a better way of doing things.

Platform Engineering isn’t DevOps 2.0. It’s a practical approach that enables “dev at scale” by creating a layer between infrastructure and development teams that serves both needs. 

As Elliott explains in the webinar, “Platform Engineering is the idea of allowing developers to leverage tools created by a platform team to develop and push out new services much faster than before.” 

Note: You may hear the terms “Platform Engineering” and “Platform Ops” used interchangeably, including in our webinar. They refer to the same concept – both describe the practice of building and maintaining internal developer platforms to enable self-service infrastructure. 

The core principles include: 

• Self-service: Empowering developers to deploy their own services when needed 
• Standardisation: Ensuring everything is deployed in a consistent, secure manner 
• Guardrails: Implementing policies that prevent risky configurations without slowing down development 

In a way, it’s like creating a menu of pre-approved, secure services that developers can choose from and deploy themselves—without needing to raise a ticket and wait for the infrastructure team. 

Platform engineering vs DevOps 

While these terms are sometimes used interchangeably, they’re different approaches: 

• DevOps focuses on breaking down silos between development and operations through culture, practices, and tools 
• Platform Engineering creates internal developer platforms that abstract away infrastructure complexity 

In essence, Platform Engineering provides the tools and services that make DevOps practices more efficient and accessible. Rather than replacing DevOps, it enhances and scales it across your organisation. 

Platform Engineering brings several tangible benefits for development-led companies: 

A better developer experience 

Instead of submitting requests and waiting for infrastructure teams to fulfil them, developers can self-serve from a catalogue of pre-approved, secure templates. This turns a process that might take weeks into one that takes minutes or hours. 

For example, imagine a development team that typically waits two weeks for a new environment to be provisioned. With platform engineering, they could potentially deploy the same environment in under an hour. In many scenarios, this could be transformational for the developer experience. 

When developers can focus on writing code rather than wrestling with infrastructure, their productivity can soar and job satisfaction will improve. This can potentially make Platform Engineering a powerful tool for both retention and recruitment when you’re seeking talent in the competitive tech job market. 

Improved security and governance 

Platform Engineering can actually enhance security rather than compromise it. If you build security standards directly into templates and implement guardrails through policies, you catch issues before deployment rather than after. 

As Elliott notes in the webinar, when developers and infrastructure teams work separately, they “end up continuously deploying risky infrastructure into the environment”. Platform Engineering prevents this by security risk by baking security into the process. 

Reduced costs and risks 

With standardised deployments and automated checks, you’ll see fewer errors, less rework, and more consistent environments. This leads to cost savings through both reduced labour and more efficient resource utilisation. 

And the dreaded risk of “shadow IT” decreases dramatically when developers have an approved, easy-to-use path to get what they need. For cloud platform engineering specifically, this means better cost management and fewer unexpected bills. 

Here are the five key steps and best practices for platform engineering Elliott outlined in our webinar: 

1. Audit your bottlenecks

Where are developers waiting today? Where are Ops firefighting? 

Start by understanding where the friction points are in your current processes: 

• Identify which processes take the longest between request and delivery 
• Look for services that developers frequently need but struggle to get quickly 
• Track where your operations team spends most of their time fixing issues rather than creating value 

As Elliott advised: “Audit where you’re currently being slowed down. So within your business, where’s the issue?” 

2. Define your platform engineering golden paths

Pick 2-3 standardised templates (e.g., dev environments, SQL databases, app stacks) and lock in your best practices. 

“Don’t try and template everything,” Elliott cautioned. “Go and choose the two or three things that get done all the time… Choose one of those, and then go: ‘Okay. What does ‘good’ look like?’” 

This step is about creating a clear definition of how resources should look like in your environment: properly configured, secure, and compliant. Start small, focusing on the most common needs first. 

3. Build your service catalogue MVP

Now, you’ll want to wrap those golden paths into a simple self-service portal or pipeline trigger. 

Make them accessible to developers through: 

• Templates in the Azure Portal 
• Infrastructure as Code modules 
• A custom developer portal for larger organisations 

During the webinar, Elliott demonstrated how this approach simplifies deployment, showing an example where developers could create a complex infrastructure component with just a few lines of code rather than building everything from scratch. The result is dramatically reduced effort while maintaining consistency and security. 

4. Bake policy into your pipelines

Add cost, security, and compliance checks into the CI/CD flow, shifting governance left (earlier in the development process). This means finding and fixing issues when they’re cheapest and easiest to address, reducing risk without slowing down your developers. 

The true power of Platform Engineering emerges when policy becomes part of the deployment process itself. Integrating governance directly into your pipelines, you can catch issues before they reach production rather than after they’ve caused problems. This practice means you can automate approval workflows that previously required manual intervention, sending notifications through email or Teams when human review is needed. 

You’ll also be able to implement cost controls that prevent budget overruns and enforce compliance requirements consistently across all deployments. 

5. Surface feedback in real-time

Set up dashboards, alerts, and policy feedback that land in the tools devs already use (e.g. PRs, Slack, Teams or Azure DevOps). 

Creating this feedback loop makes sure that you have continuous improvement throughout. Developers see issues early in their workflow, platform teams get visibility into usage patterns, and security teams can monitor compliance in real-time. With this process, you’ll have everyone working from the same information. 

“If you’re pushing that out to teams channels or teams chats,” Elliott suggests, “that’s quite a good way to get visual indication of what’s going on.” 

Platform Engineering can be seen as an iterative journey. You don’t need to perfect all five steps before seeing value – even implementing the first two steps can significantly improve your developer experience and operational efficiency. 

One of the most common questions we hear is about how to build the right team for platform engineering initiatives. During our webinar, Elliott addressed these concerns directly. 

Where to start with recruitment 

If you’re transitioning from a traditional IT team structure to platform engineering, one of the most common questions is about which roles to hire first. 

This is an emerging field with role definitions still evolving across the industry, so there’s no universal approach that works for every organisation. “Platform Engineer” is becoming a recognised job title in the market, but you might also look for positions like “Principal Engineer” with cloud expertise. 

Rather than hiring a full team immediately, Elliott recommends starting with one senior, experienced person who can define standards and guide others: 

“If I needed to hire for this, I’d be getting someone very proficient that can do this, that can talk about it, and then getting them to lead the charge. Ideally, if you’ve already got a lead developer, put them next to the person that you’re interviewing.” 

From there, you can expand your team with more junior resources who have some infrastructure experience but may not yet have all the platform engineering skills: 

“Maybe they were in cloud for a year or two. They’ve maybe done a lot of infrastructure support in their previous jobs, but taught them the skills instead. It tends to be a little bit easier to teach this rather than get someone to relearn something else.” 

This approach allows you to build capability gradually while ensuring your platform engineering practices align with your specific business needs and developer requirements. 

Skills to look for in platform engineering 

When recruiting platform engineers, you’ll want to look for people with: 

• Infrastructure experience combined with coding knowledge 
• Experience with cloud environments, particularly Azure for Microsoft-focused organisations 
• Understanding of both developer and infrastructure team needs 
• Skills in automation and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) 

As Elliott notes in the webinar, “It tends to be a little bit easier to teach [platform engineering] rather than get someone to relearn something else.” Someone with a strong infrastructure background who has some coding experience (perhaps with PowerShell or basic scripting) can often transition well into a platform engineering role. 

Platform Engineering Team structure 

Another question addressed during the webinar was where this team should sit within the organisation. Elliott explained that the platform engineering team typically sits between infrastructure and development: 

“If you imagine the developers on one side, security on the other, and then instead of infrastructure being in the middle of all that, it’s now the platform engineering team, and that’s how it could operate within your company.“ 

This positioning allows the team to act as a bridge, understanding and serving the needs of both developers and infrastructure/security teams. 

We might have convinced you to bring Platform Engineering into your company. But it might not be wise to “move fast and break things” by hiring 10 people right away. This approach often leads to wasted money, increased friction between teams, and disappointing results. 

Imagine a company spending six months building complex platform engineering capabilities that ultimately deliver only £50,000 of value—clearly a poor return on investment. Contrast that with an organisation making targeted improvements with just one or two people and achieving multiples of that impact in a fraction of the time. These scenarios are both possible. 

The key difference is understanding what you’re trying to achieve and quantifying the potential value before you begin. It might be worth seeking some expert advice before you begin—and that’s where we can help. 

At Synextra, we take a pragmatic approach to platform engineering. We can: 

• Help you identify which specific pain points would benefit most from a platform engineering approach 
• Quantify the potential ROI of different implementations 
• Design targeted solutions that deliver maximum value with minimum disruption 
• Help build reusable pipelines and modules tailored to your specific needs 
• Support your existing team to develop platform engineering capabilities 

Want to learn more? Watch the full webinar recording or get in touch with our team to discuss how Platform Engineering could transform developer experience in your organisation.