Platform Engineering vs DevOps: What’s the Difference?
As software teams grow and scale, two modern practices often come into play: Platform Engineering vs DevOps. While they share similar goals—like improving developer productivity, deployment speed, and operational reliability—they are not the same.
In this guide, we'll explore the key differences between platform engineering and DevOps, where they overlap, and how companies can leverage both effectively.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a cultural and technical movement that emphasizes collaboration between development and operations teams. The goal is to shorten the software development lifecycle, ensure continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), and improve system reliability.
Key principles of DevOps:
Breaking down silos between developers and IT
Automating the CI/CD pipeline
Monitoring and incident response
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Continuous improvement
DevOps is more of a philosophy and set of practices than a defined role.
What is Platform Engineering?
Platform Engineering focuses on building and maintaining internal developer platforms (IDPs) that provide self-service tools and workflows for development teams. These platforms abstract the complexities of infrastructure, environments, and deployment so developers can ship faster and more safely.
Key responsibilities of platform engineers:
Building golden paths (predefined, secure workflows)
Managing Kubernetes clusters, CI/CD tools, secrets, etc.
Providing APIs and interfaces for developers
Enabling standardized and scalable infrastructure setups
Platform engineering is more product-focused, building “platforms as a product” that internal teams use.
Platform Engineering vs DevOps: The Core Differences
How They Work Together
Platform engineering is not a replacement for DevOps—it’s a natural evolution. While DevOps focuses on enabling faster and reliable delivery, platform engineering provides the tools, environments, and systems that make DevOps workflows scalable and consistent.
For example:
DevOps defines how CI/CD should work
Platform engineering builds the pipelines and tools to make it happen for every team
When to Use What?
Use DevOps when:
You're building a DevOps culture in a startup or small team
You need shared responsibility between developers and ops
You’re establishing CI/CD and automation
Use Platform Engineering when:
You have many teams deploying services independently
You need standardization, governance, and self-service
You want to scale DevOps practices across the org
In large organizations, both practices often coexist—DevOps for culture and collaboration, and platform engineering for tooling and infrastructure abstraction.
Final Thoughts
DevOps and Platform Engineering serve the same high-level mission: delivering better software faster and more reliably. DevOps lays the cultural groundwork, while platform engineering builds the tooling foundation. Together, they help modern teams scale confidently and efficiently.
Looking to streamline API testing in DevOps or platform workflows? Try Keploy — an open-source tool for generating tests and mocks from real traffic, reducing manual effort and boosting coverage.
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