Platform Engineering: Where to Begin (and Why It Matters)
This blog is part of our Platform Engineering series. For a deeper understanding of our perspective on platform engineering, check out our other posts:
In this post, we focus on how and when to start with platform engineering in your organization.
When Should You Start?
The best time to start Platform Engineering is when you start your very first software project.
That might sound bold, but it reflects a deeper idea: It’s about defining **how your teams work**, from day one.
Before the first lines of code are written, organizations make decisions about tools, workflows, environments, access strategies, and ways of collaborating. If these aren't designed with reuse, scale, and developer experience in mind, you'll accumulate tech debt before your product even launches.
The second-best time to start Platform Engineering is now.
Whether you call it Platform Engineering or not, there is probably somebody in your organization thinking about how your developers work: setting up onboarding guides, creating environments, managing access, etc.
Platform Engineering is not just a tooling function. It’s a mindset of intentionality, enablement, and continuous improvement. And the sooner you start, the fewer shortcuts you'll have to untangle later.
So how do you get started? The first step is building a clear, accessible foundation and that's where Internal Developer Portals come in.
What to Build First: The Portal, Not the Platform
When organizations decide to "start with platform engineering," the natural instinct is to begin building infrastructure tooling, reusable components or even automation. But this can be a costly mistake if you haven't yet aligned how your teams work or what practices should be standardized. If you automate chaos, you just get faster chaos.
That’s why the first thing you should build isn’t the platform, it’s the portal.
The Internal Developer Portal becomes your central source of truth for how development should be done. It sets the foundation for everything that follows. Before infrastructure modules or developer self-service interfaces, you need to document how code is written, tested, deployed, and maintained in your organization. Without that, teams will invent their own workflows, leading to fragmentation, duplicated effort, and inconsistent quality.
So, what should this first version of the portal contain? Start simple. Include the basic conventions and tooling that developers and teams repeatedly need:
How to set up a new project
Version control practices (workflows, branching, code reviews)
Logging and monitoring conventions
Dependency policies
Infrastructure and IaC guidelines
CI/CD pipeline conventions
Security and compliance basics
FinOps and cost management practices
Naming conventions and tagging policies
Access and onboarding instructions
Preferred architectures, tools and services
You don’t need a fancy web application to start, any accessible and versioned documentation tool will work (e.g., Confluence). The key is consistency, clarity, and ownership.
The portal isn't a one-team project either. It requires close collaboration with development teams, security & compliance stakeholders, and even product managers. You’ll need to balance technical standards with business priorities, regulatory concerns, and actual developer needs. And just as importantly, you’ll need to iterate. The first version doesn’t need to be exhaustive or perfect, it just needs to start. Improvement comes through usage and feedback.
Think of this documentation as more than just a guide. It also acts as a specification for your future automations: for reusable infrastructure and CI/CD pipeline components, developer self-service tools, and security policies. By clearly defining the way your teams should work, you’re paving the way for automation that is meaningful, scalable, and secure.
And one more thing: structure your documentation so it’s AI-ready. Whether you’re planning to build a custom chatbot or integrate with tools like GitHub Copilot or ChatGPT, structured and searchable content makes it possible. Use consistent formatting, headings, and clear language. Consider using markdown-based docs stored in version control, so that your documentation can later be easily indexed and queried by AI systems.
A good Internal Developer Portal isn’t just for humans, it’s the foundation for intelligent assistance down the road.
From Documentation to Enablement: Building Reusable Components
Once your Internal Developer Portal begins capturing shared development standards, it’s time to move from theory to practice. This is where Platform Engineering starts creating real, day-to-day impact: not through automation alone, but through reusable building blocks that bring consistency, quality, and speed to every project.
Reusable components allow developers to focus on solving business problems instead of reinventing infrastructure or pipelines from scratch. Instead of just saying here’s how to do it, you give teams ready-to-use, secure, and standardized implementations.
You don’t need to wait until your portal is perfectly done. As soon as you’ve defined how something should work, like deploying a container or configuring a monitoring stack, you can start codifying it into a reusable module or template.
A solid component library might include:
IaC Modules – E.g., Terraform modules or CDK functions for resources like buckets, container and kubernetes services, or secure networking setups.
CI/CD Pipeline Templates – Standardized workflows with built-in quality gates, security scanning and deployment logic.
Internal Libraries & Utilities – Logging libraries, observability SDKs, or helper functions that reduce inconsistency and improve DX.
To make these components scalable and easy to adopt:
Store each of them in a dedicated repository, versioned and well-documented.
Reference them directly from your portal, including examples and usage tips.
Embed guardrails—like tagging, monitoring, and security defaults so that best practices are followed by default.
Over time, these reusable components will form the foundation of your automations. They reduce onboarding time, increase confidence in deployments, and help scale your development practices across teams without relying on tribal knowledge.
The magic of platform engineering isn’t just in defining how things should be done, it’s in making it easy to do them right. Reusable components are where that magic begins.
Adopt, Refine, and Expand
Once your Internal Developer Portal is live and your first reusable components are in place, the next step is clear: drive adoption and improve continuously.
Encourage teams to start using the portal and components in real projects. Collect feedback to refine documentation, improve usability, and identify gaps. This is where your platform engineering efforts start generating real impact through usage, iteration, and expansion.
At the same time, look for other repetitive workflows that can be standardized and automated: such as creating new repositories and cloud environments, provisioning observability and other third-party services, and managing access and permissions to these resources.
The goal? Spinning up a new project in minutes. Most of these workflows can already be automated with Infrastructure as Code tools like Terraform, bringing them under version control, improving auditability, and making processes repeatable and secure.
As your organization scales, you’ll naturally begin to identify patterns that work well across teams. These golden paths are your signal to consider the next step: building an Internal Developer Platform.
An Internal Developer Platform is the automation layer behind your portal. It connects the documentation and standards you’ve built to real-world workflows: provisioning infra, wiring up CI/CD, applying security policies, and more. But don’t rush into it. Let maturity and adoption guide the investment. But that’s it for now, stay tuned for future posts about Internal Developer Platforms.
What’s next
We’ll continue to explore how platform engineering can evolve to meet the needs of modern organizations. Stay tuned for future posts, where we’ll dive deeper into various aspects of platform engineering.
Ready to transform your organization with platform engineering? Check out our Platform Engineering services and reach out to explore how we can help.