Platform Engineering: How to Reduce Developer Burden and Scale Your Infrastructure

Platform Engineering: Key Takeaways

• Self-Service Infrastructure: Developers independently request required resources like databases or cloud environments via a portal, instead of waiting for approvals from the IT department.
• Cognitive Relief: The platform hides the complexity of underlying systems (e.g., Kubernetes), allowing your team to focus on application logic instead of infrastructure configuration.
• Golden Paths: Predefined templates and automated workflows ensure that every new project is set up securely, scalably, and according to internal standards from the outset.
• Compliance: Security policies and requirements of the Swiss Data Protection Act (nDSG) are directly integrated into the platform tools and automatically enforced with every deployment.

Why is DevOps no longer sufficient for many teams?

The "You build it, you run it" DevOps model reaches its limits as soon as complexity exceeds developers' capacity. In theory, teams should operate their applications independently, but in reality, this often leads to software developers spending a large portion of their time maintaining Kubernetes clusters, security patches, and cloud configurations.

The need for Platform Engineering arises from:

• Cognitive Overload (Cognitive Load): Developers have to master too many different tools and languages (YAML, Terraform, Docker, Cloud APIs), which limits their focus on the actual programming work.
• Shadow IT: Without overarching guidelines, each team sometimes builds its own infrastructure solutions. This complicates later maintenance and makes knowledge transfer between projects almost impossible.
• Inefficient Delays: If developers have to open a ticket with a central IT department for every database or SSL certificate, bottlenecks arise that slow down the entire release process.
• Lack of Compliance Control: In a decentralized environment, it is difficult to fully guarantee and audit compliance with the nDSG across all microservices.

How does an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) help my team?

An Internal Developer Platform (IDP) is a layer between infrastructure tools (like AWS, Azure, or Kubernetes) and the developer. It acts as a kind of operating system for software development. Instead of each developer having to write their own deployment scripts, they use the IDP to request predefined resources. The platform then automatically translates these requests into the correct technical configuration.

• Self-Service Portal: A graphical interface or a command-line tool (CLI) that allows developers to independently create new environments, databases, or cloud resources. The process runs automatically in the background, without any intervention from the operations team.
• Service Catalog: A central directory of all microservices and applications existing within the company. Here, everyone can see who is responsible for which service, which interfaces exist, and what the current status of deployments looks like.
• Workload Abstraction: The IDP hides the technical details of the infrastructure. A developer simply specifies how much memory or computing power their application needs. The platform then takes care of providing these resources in the cloud or in the local data center.
• Integrated Governance & Security: Security checks, backup strategies, and access permissions should be an integral part of the platform. When a developer launches a new service, it automatically receives the correct configuration, for example, to comply with the Swiss Data Protection Act (nDSG).

What is the purpose of the Golden Path in Platform Engineering?

The Golden Path is a predefined and validated way to solve a software task. Instead of reconfiguring the entire infrastructure every time, your team relies on proven templates (scaffolding) that already meet all company standards. 

Within this Golden Path, automated CI/CD pipelines, monitoring dashboards, and security scans are already pre-configured and ready to use "out-of-the-box". This ensures enormous consistency across the entire software portfolio:

Every new project starts with the same high quality in architecture and security features. Since the Platform that handles routine tasks, the risk of errors is almost completely eliminated.

For Swiss companies, the Golden Path is also the most powerful tool for ensuring compliance with regulations such as the nDSG. Guidelines, for instance on data storage in local data centers or encryption, are embedded directly into the path as "Policy as Code."

With the Golden Path, you ensure that your team can release quickly and the platform guarantees compliance with all legal and technical guardrails in the background.

What role does Platform Engineering play in nDSG compliance?

For Swiss companies, Platform Engineering also serves as a control instrument for data sovereignty. The revised Data Protection Act (nDSG) mandates "Privacy by Design" and "Privacy by Default." In decentralized DevOps, manually verifying these principles in every single microservice is almost impossible. 

However, Platform Engineering ensures nDSG compliance at the following levels:

• Enforced Data Locality: The platform can be configured to permit deployments exclusively to Swiss cloud regions or local on-premise servers. System-side blocks prevent misconfigurations that could inadvertently transfer data abroad.
• Identity Management: Access permissions (IAM) are managed through the platform. This ensures consistent adherence to the "Least Privilege" principle, granting access to productive personal data only to authorized individuals.
• Automated Audit Logs: Since every infrastructure request passes through the platform, a complete audit trail is automatically generated. In the event of a data protection audit, you can, at the push of a button, demonstrate who provisioned or modified which resources and when.
• Encryption: Instead of relying on each developer to remember "at rest" and "in transit" encryption, the platform enforces these security features automatically when a new database or storage medium is created.

Your High-End Platform from Switzerland

We help you build your own Developer Platform. As experts in cloud-native architectures, we know what your team will need and how to make their work as easy as possible.

• Consulting: We analyze your existing toolchain and jointly define the golden paths that will most significantly accelerate your time-to-market.
• Building IDPs: We create user-friendly portals that make your infrastructure (AWS, Azure, or local Swiss clouds) accessible via self-service.
• Automation & Governance: We integrate security checks and nDSG compliance directly into your pipelines so that every deployment automatically meets all policies.
• Guidance: We help your team transition from traditional DevOps structures to product-oriented Platform Engineering.

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