By Tobi Knaup
Platform engineering is the practice of creating a reusable set of standardized tools, components and automated processes, often referred to as an internal developer platform (IDP). IDPs, and the teams that build them, are important because they ease development by providing “golden paths” for developers to self-serve and self-manage their code.
At KubeCon 2022, Jason English, Intellyx principal analyst, stated that if there was one big takeaway from the conference, “it would be the reemergence of the platform paradigm in cloud-native clothing.” 
In the platform-centric model, enterprises that successfully deliver industrial-strength cloud-native applications are doing so with a platform strategy that eases Kubernetes development and management for DevOps teams.
Rather than struggle to create IDE’s by trial and error, DevOps teams “should instead lean on an expert platform team that can readily package approved ‘golden state’ environments of Kubernetes clusters for them–with scaling, networking and security settings optimized for the target application and infrastructure,” says English.
To further reduce complexity, these types of platforms are being made available from Kubernetes vendors as full-featured turnkey solutions, essentially providing “instant platform engineering.”
