October 2025
Intermediate to advanced
46 pages
54m
English
Content preview from Platform as a Product
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Chapter 1. The Platform Imperative: Why Internal Platforms Are Now Essential
In recent years, the challenges of software delivery have shifted. It is no longer enough to ship code quickly. Teams must also ensure that delivery is secure, compliant, observable, adaptable, and resilient. Traditionally, organizations have scaled their engineering efforts by adding more developers, more services, and more infrastructure. Recently, organizations have embraced AI-assisted development, third-party services, and cloud resources. Regardless of the path chosen, the complexity of delivering and operating software has been increasing rapidly.
As discussed in the namesake book by Camille Fournier and Ian Nowland, the concept of platform engineering has emerged in response to a growing disconnect within software delivery.1 While cloud native technologies have made infrastructure more powerful and flexible, they have also made it harder for developers to deliver software independently. Kubernetes, Terraform, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, and cloud APIs are powerful tools, but they introduce significant operational overhead. Without the right abstractions, developers are forced to wrestle with YAML, wait on tickets, or take on operational responsibilities they were never trained for.
This is where the platform team (or teams in larger contexts) comes in. Its role is not simply to manage tools but also to build a product, an internal developer platform (IDP), that ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.