The term platform engineering has been gaining momentum for the past couple of years and if you work in DevOps or infrastructure you have probably noticed it appearing in job postings, conference talks, and Gartner reports with increasing frequency. I want to give you a clear-headed explanation of what it actually means, how it relates to what DevOps professionals have been doing, and what the certification implications are.
Platform engineering is the discipline of building and maintaining internal developer platforms that abstract away infrastructure complexity and enable development teams to provision, deploy, and manage their applications without needing deep infrastructure expertise. Where DevOps focused heavily on breaking down silos between development and operations teams, platform engineering focuses on building self-service infrastructure capabilities that let development teams move fast without requiring constant support from specialized infrastructure engineers.
The practical distinction is meaningful. In a DevOps model, developers are often expected to own significant portions of their infrastructure configuration and operations. In a platform engineering model, a dedicated platform team builds and maintains the infrastructure layer as an internal product, and application teams consume it through well-defined interfaces without needing to understand the implementation details. The platform team is the infrastructure expertise. The application teams are the customers.
Why does this matter for certification strategy? Because the skills most valuable in a platform engineering role are somewhat different from the skills most valuable in a traditional DevOps role, even though there is substantial overlap. Kubernetes expertise is central to platform engineering because Kubernetes is the substrate that most internal developer platforms are built on. The CKA is a foundational credential in this space in a way that it is important but not always foundational in broader DevOps work.
Infrastructure as code skills are essential. Terraform expertise, specifically understanding how to build modular, maintainable Terraform configurations that can be used as building blocks by teams who are not Terraform experts, is a core platform engineering competency. The HashiCorp Terraform certification validates the foundational level of those skills.
Observability and platform reliability skills are also increasingly important. The ability to build and maintain the monitoring, logging, and alerting infrastructure that gives development teams visibility into their applications, and that gives the platform team visibility into the platform itself, is a meaningful part of the platform engineering job description.
From a cloud certification perspective, the professional-level cloud architect credentials from AWS and Azure are well-aligned with platform engineering work because they address the design and governance considerations that become critical when you are building infrastructure that many teams will rely on. The AWS Solutions Architect Professional and the Azure Solutions Architect Expert both provide relevant content. The certification details are available at the AWS certification page and through Microsoft Learn.
Platform engineering is a direction that the industry is moving, not a trend that will be replaced by next year’s terminology. Building the skills that align with it now means positioning yourself well for the roles that will reflect this direction as it continues to mature.
Brian Rhoades is a Senior VMware Instructor and IT veteran with more than 15 years of hands-on experience in virtualization, systems engineering, and cloud infrastructure. He has trained thousands of IT professionals to confidently work with VMware vSphere, vSAN, and NSX, and has authored multiple books and study guides for outlets across the industry. Brian has a habit of being somewhere new every few weeks, which if you've ever tried to pin down a good VMware instructor, explains a lot.