October 2025
Intermediate
12h 20m
English
video
Effective Platform Engineering, Video Edition
by Sean Alvarez, Ajay Chankramath, Bryan Oliver, Nic Cheneweth
Closed Captioning available in German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese
Overview
In Video Editions the narrator reads the book while the content, figures, code listings, diagrams, and text appear on the screen. Like an audiobook that you can also watch as a video.
Build the kind of software engineering platforms developers love to use!
An effective developer platform means one thing: productivity. Effective Platform Engineering introduces platform engineering as a discipline, teaching you what goes into a great developer platform and then showing you how to develop your own.
In Effective Platform Engineering, you’ll learn to deliver:
- Improved business outcomes
- Product management strategies
- Secure, scalable Kubernetes-based engineering platforms
- Effective Service Level Objectives to boost trust and adoption
- Modern control plane patterns that streamline developer workflows
Effective Platform Engineering shows you how to establish and administer the kind of platforms that reduce a dev team’s workload, improve consistency, and accelerate software delivery. Organized in three parts—foundations, building, and scaling—it blends mental models, patterns, and runnable examples to help you go from MVP to production-grade platform. You’ll learn how to treat platforms as products and demonstrate their value by improving engineering outcomes and delivering measurable business impact. You’ll love the book’s informed guidance and practical insights on satisfying stakeholders and driving organizational success.
About the Technology
Platform engineering is the discipline of building internal developer platforms (IDPs) that automate and simplify the software development lifecycle. IDPs provide self-service interfaces to tools and services for infrastructure, deployment, security, observability, and governance, and reduce the need for developers to master complex technologies like Kubernetes. Because they match the specific needs of an organization, well-engineered IDPs can reduce development time by half while delivering better software.
About the Book
With Effective Platform Engineering you’ll be able to design, build, deploy, and scale a custom IDP. You’ll discover how platform engineering differs from DevOps and learn to create a platform that evolves with changing requirements. Diagrams, code samples, and exercises help you visualize important concepts. Along the way, you’ll explore critical topics like gathering requirements and establishing realistic service level agreements (SLAs).
What's Inside
- Automated application workflows
- Scalable Kubernetes-based platforms
- A well-designed control plane
- Custom APIs
About the Reader
For software engineers, SREs, and DevOps engineers.
About the Authors
Ajay Chankramath is the Founder and CEO of Platformetrics. Nic Cheneweth and Bryan Oliver are Principal Consultants at Thoughtworks. Sean Alvarez is the CTO of Life Sciences at Brillio.
Quotes
Shows what it really takes to build platforms teams want to use.
- Manuel Pais, Author of Team Topologies, The Platform Manifesto, and Fast Flow Thought Leader
Grounded in real practice, not theory. Read and learn!
- Kaspar von Grünberg, Humanitec
A masterclass in platform engineering!
- Francesco Soncini Sessa, Mia-Platform
Battle-tested patterns and practices that separate successful platforms from costly missteps.
- Wesley Reisz, Creator of the InfoQ Podcast
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Watch now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
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.