The Platform Engineer's Handbook: Build secure, developer-focused platforms that streamline modern software delivery

Deliver developer-friendly infrastructure with automation, AI acceleration, and real-world platform patterns all built from scratch on your laptop

Key Features

• Hands-on guide to designing, deploying, and evolving engineering platforms with real-world patterns
• Focus on developer experience, enabling self-service, scalability, and AI augmentation from day one
• Built for practitioners offering step-by-step, practical knowledge for shaping modern delivery
• Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free PDF eBook

Book Description

The Platform Engineer’s Handbook equips senior engineers and DevOps professionals to deliver developer-friendly infrastructure with automation, speed, AI acceleration, and intelligence. Starting with a blank slate, you’ll build a complete, modern platform that runs locally on your laptop, learning real-world patterns as you go.

In this handbook, you’ll follow a structured, progressive journey, beginning with source control governance and branching strategies, then deploying a Kubernetes-based runtime, embedding observability, and securing platform access. You’ll implement self-service onboarding, CI/CD as a service, and developer portals with Backstage. Later chapters introduce infrastructure blueprints, policy as code, FinOps observability, and AI-augmented platform services such as agent-based onboarding and copilots for pipeline creation.

Each chapter combines core concepts, lab-based exercises, and production-ready best practices to provide a comprehensive understanding of the subject matter. By the end, you'll have a working MVP platform and the skills to adapt and scale it for your team or organization.

What you will learn

• Build a scalable, developer-focused engineering platform MVP
• Enable self-service onboarding and app deployment
• Create golden paths with reusable CI/CD workflows
• Scaffold new projects with portal-based starter kits
• Automate secure access with OAuth and RBAC
• Publish services to a centralized developer portal
• Deliver platform features with AI-augmented tooling
• Scale platform services without disrupting users

Who this book is for

This book is intended for intermediate to senior software engineers and DevOps professionals with prior experience in cloud-native software development patterns and practices who are interested in learning how to build secure, scalable engineering platforms to accelerate software delivery and the why behind it.

Table of Contents

1. Platform Engineering: Laying the Groundwork
2. Scalable Platform Runtime with Kubernetes and Service Mesh
3. Securing Platform Access
4. Embedding Observability
5. Evaluate the User Experience
6. Accelerating DevEx: Deploying and Curating Your First Developer Portal
7. Self-Service Platform Onboarding
8. CI/CD as a Platform Service
9. Self-Service Infrastructure Management
10. Publishing Starter Kits
11. Validating Compliance with Policy as Code
12. Optimize Cost, Performance, and Scalability
13. Resilience Automation
14. Agentic and AI-Augmented Platforms

Ajay Chankramath is a global technology leader with nearly four decades of experience in software development, platform engineering, and AI-augmented software delivery. As Founder, CEO, and CTO of Platformetrics, he advises organizations on improving software delivery and engineering effectiveness. He also serves as CTO of Platform Engineering Consulting & Advisory, one of the world's largest platform engineering communities. Previously, he held leadership roles at Brillio, Thoughtworks, Oracle, Broadridge, and Xilinx, helping shape modern platform engineering practices. Ajay is the co-author of Effective Platform Engineering and Domain-Driven Platform Engineering, and is a sought-after speaker, instructor, and thought leader whose work continues to influence engineering organizations worldwide.