When I first heard the term “platform engineering,” I rolled my eyes. I thought: Another buzzword. I’d spent years perfecting my DevOps skills — pipelines, Terraform, Kubernetes, monitoring stacks — and felt comfortable being the bridge between dev and ops.

But the more I worked on increasingly complex, distributed systems, the more I saw the pain points:

• Onboarding was a mess.

• Every team rebuilt the same CI/CD workflows.

• Security drifted because no one could keep track of 40 different repositories.

That’s when I started to see why platform engineering is catching fire in 2025.

The Real Difference I Felt

Here’s how I’d put it, from the trenches:

• DevOps is about empowering teams to own their software delivery. You help them, you teach them, you build shared tooling.

• Platform engineering is about productizing that help. You don’t just give them scripts or best practices — you build a cohesive, opinionated internal developer platform (IDP), with golden paths and paved roads.

For me, the turning point was seeing how onboarding changed. Before, a new dev might spend two weeks wiring up their dev environment. When we moved to a platform approach, they ran npx create-app from our Backstage-powered portal, and were live in 30 minutes with:

✅ Proper permissions
✅ Secure CI/CD
✅ Secrets rotated automatically
✅ Observability pre-wired

That was the “aha” moment where I realized platform engineering wasn’t just corporate theater — it solved real pain.

What It’s Actually Like to Build Platforms

If you’re considering jumping in, know this: you’ll move from “here’s how you do it” to “I’m responsible for making it invisible.”

• Instead of handing teams a YAML file for ArgoCD, you might wrap ArgoCD behind a developer-friendly UI in Backstage.

• Instead of telling people to remember security policies, you bake them into reusable pipelines.

• Instead of a fleet of random Dockerfiles, you ship curated base images and manage them as products.

That work is messy, political, and takes empathy — you’re not coding for end users; you’re coding for other engineers.

If you love building for other developers, platform engineering is absolutely worth a jump.

Tools I’d Bet On

I won’t sugarcoat it — platform engineering means you’ll be learning a new toolbox:

• Backstage (Spotify’s framework, still dominant in 2025)

• Crossplane (Kubernetes-native platform for provisioning infrastructure)

• Spacelift or Terraform Cloud for secure IaC workflows

• OPA / Kyverno for policy as code

• Pulumi (still relevant for developer-friendly infra coding)

• Scorecards, developer portals, and templates — yes, you’ll become an internal product manager, basically

And you’ll glue them together with language skills you know well (TypeScript, Go, Python).

The Human Side: Platform vs. DevOps

Here’s what they don’t put in the job description:

✅ Platform engineering requires you to advocate and evangelize. You’ll be selling the platform to skeptical developers who don’t want to change.
✅ DevOps lets you stay closer to delivery teams — in the daily standups, fighting fires, running retros.
✅ Platform shifts you further “left” — you’ll talk to security, compliance, management, and treat developers as your customers.

That switch is subtle but huge. If you love mentoring, bridging, and getting code out the door with devs, DevOps might still be your place.

If you love designing systems for devs, to make their lives simpler, platform is where the action is.

So… Should You Jump?

If I were mentoring you today, I’d ask these:

• Do you like building tools for other developers? That’s platform.

• Do you love being in the delivery trenches with a team? That’s DevOps.

• Do you have the political and product skills to push adoption? Platform needs that.

• Are you energized by standardization and solving friction? Platform.

• Do you enjoy teaching and improving day-to-day pipelines? DevOps.

There’s no shame in staying in classic DevOps — we still desperately need experts who know pipelines, IaC, and observability. But if you want to productize that, and you have the patience to manage change, platform engineering is genuinely worth exploring.

My Advice If You’re Curious

• Shadow a platform team — ask them to show you their Backstage stack, their golden paths, their design documents.

• Run a personal POC — spin up a mini-IDP with a Backstage plugin and a Crossplane cluster; see how it feels.

• Read case studies — Spotify, American Airlines, Netflix, and others have written about their platform journeys.

• Talk to your developers — you’ll learn what really hurts them, and see if you want to help fix it at scale.

If I had to say one thing plainly: DevOps is still great, but platform engineering is how DevOps scales. That’s the catch.

So should you jump in? Only if you’re ready to think like a product owner, code like a backend engineer, and champion your fellow devs as customers.

Otherwise, DevOps will happily welcome you — and still pay you well.