8 Platform Engineering Anti-Patterns

Core Message

Platform engineering initiatives are often failing or stalling because organizations fall into common traps. The central theme is that building a successful internal developer platform (IDP) requires treating it like a product—with a focus on user (developer) needs, iterative development, and measurable business value—rather than as a top-down IT project or a simple rebranding of the operations team.

Key Anti-Patterns and Arguments

The article identifies eight common mistakes that undermine platform engineering efforts:

• Building the Front End First: Prioritizing the user interface (UI) over a solid backend with APIs and orchestration is a mistake. This locks developers into a single interaction model and neglects the platform’s core functionality.
• Lacking a Product Mindset: Platforms won’t be adopted just because they exist. They need internal marketing, user feedback loops, and iterative improvement, starting with a Minimum Viable Platform (MVP).
• No Shared Ownership: Forcing a platform on developers with a top-down mandate leads to workarounds and low adoption. Empowering teams to contribute and customize the platform, as Spotify does with Backstage, fosters buy-in.
• Not Surveying Users: Building a platform without deeply understanding the specific pain points of its different users (e.g., Java developers vs. SREs) results in a tool that doesn’t improve efficiency.
• Tracking the Wrong Metrics: Focusing on vanity metrics like adoption percentage is misleading. Success should be measured by its impact on business goals, such as improved time-to-market and reduced costs.
• Copying Others’ Platforms: Solutions from large companies like Spotify don’t necessarily translate to smaller organizations. Each company must tailor its platform to its unique scale and challenges.
• Overengineering on Day One: Trying to build a perfect, all-encompassing platform from the start leads to unnecessary complexity. It’s better to solve concrete, immediate problems first and add features incrementally.
• Rebranding the Operations Team: Platform engineering is a significant cultural shift, not just a new name for the infrastructure team. It requires a new mindset focused on enabling developers, not just managing infrastructure.

Conclusions and Takeaways

Success in platform engineering is not guaranteed, and recent data from the 2024 DORA Report shows mixed results on productivity and stability. The article concludes that platform engineering is a continuous, evolving process. The most critical factor for success is to consistently apply product management fundamentals: treat the IDP as an internal product that must continuously adapt to the evolving needs of its developer customers.

Mentoring question

Reflecting on your own organization’s developer tools and workflows, which of these eight anti-patterns presents the biggest current risk, and what is one small step you could take to address it by adopting more of a ‘product mindset’?

Source: https://www.infoworld.com/article/4064273/8-platform-engineering-anti-patterns.html