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Platform Engineering has quickly become one of the hottest topics in DevOps. The explosion of new technologies has made developing software more interesting but has substantially increased the number of things that development teams need to understand and own. Couple this with the ever-increasing cost of development cycles, organizations are interested in anything that will make them more efficient. 

The weight of understanding ever-changing technologies coupled with a “you build it, you run it” approach has led to many development teams seeing their velocity crash. This heavy cognitive load can have severe negative impacts on our ability to effectively complete complex tasks, like coding. Reducing the cognitive pressure on stream-aligned development teams enables them to focus more readily on the code underlying the business’s core products. One of the most important resources within a tech company is developer cycles, so finding ways to maximize that investment into the core product is essential.

The recent Puppet State of DevOps report found that organizations with platform teams increased developer velocity, improved system reliability, obtained greater productivity, and implemented better workflow standards. However, creating a healthy, effective platform is not necessarily straightforward.

Understanding how to improve the day-to-day lives of developers at your own company can be more challenging than it sounds. The platform that is built has to not only streamline development but be low-friction, low-cost, and reduce cognitive load on its users. This is why many advocate for treating the platform as a product with an empowered product manager at the helm. 

Rather than taking a trial-and-error approach, we have distilled and collected the expertise from many different software leaders to help readers in building, operating, and evolving their own platforms and platform teams.

We would love to receive your feedback via editors@infoq.com or on Twitter about this eMag. I hope you have a great time reading it!

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