Learn what it takes to get into platform engineering, one of the hottest IT careers today.
Translated from How to Become a Platform Engineer by Luca Galante. With community events such as PlatformCon tripling in size in just a few years, industry research reports say that platform engineers can earn up to 42% more than DevOps5%, not to mention the growing number of industry certifications, it's no wonder that platform engineering is one of the hottest IT careers today. The question is: what exactly does it mean to be a platform engineer, and how can you become one?
Platform engineering is the discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that provide self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations in the cloud-native era. Platform engineers provide an integrated product, often referred to as an in-house developer platform (IDP), that covers the operational needs of the entire lifecycle of an application. 
Reference architecture for a sample IDP on AWS.
Platform engineers build and run IDPs to provide a path and enable developer self-service. An IDP is made up of a number of different technologies and tools that operate across five layers: the developer control plane, the integration and delivery plane, the monitoring and logging plane, the security plane, and the resource plane. These tools include platform orchestrators such as Spotify's Backstage, Argo CD, and Humanitec, which are glued together in a way that reduces the cognitive load on developers without abstracting away the context and underlying technology.
Whether you're at the beginning of your engineering journey, a senior DevOps engineer, or a reliability engineer (SRE) looking to advance your career, it's critical to understand that platform engineering isn't just a technology shift – first and foremost, it's a mindset shift. Over the past few years, I've seen dozens of platform teams fail. Why?It's often because operations and infrastructure people are simply rebranded as platform teams that are building content that doesn't actually serve developers despite their best intentions. Instead, they built a platform that solved their operational problems, not the developers' problems.
One of the most important elements of platform engineering is to shift to a product mindset and treat your platform as a product. Platform engineers must build and maintain products for their customers (developers). Whether the product is for an internal customer (their developer) or an external customer, the principles that make product management successful are the same as driving the best platform teams. Platform engineers must also understand the technical fundamentals and principles of cloud computing, infrastructure, container orchestration, etc., and have a broad understanding of their company's tools. However, the most important factor that differentiates a platform engineer from the rest is to use product management principles and follow best practices. If you want to be a successful platform engineer, ask yourself the following questions:
How will you conduct user research to provide solutions that address real pain points?
How do you define a path that developers love to help ensure high adoption of the platform?
How do you find the right level of abstraction that reduces the cognitive load on developers while preserving all the context?
How will you market the platform to all relevant stakeholders? How will you organize stakeholder buy-in to secure funding for your platform engineering initiative?
Will you start with a minimum viable platform (MVP)? Or plan a very big plan to cover all the end cases, even if it might take years to build? Operations professionals rarely ask themselves these types of questions, and it's easy to get lost. But becoming a platform engineer isn't as easy as simply changing your job title on LinkedIn. Fortunately, there are plenty of resources out there that can make it easier for you to answer these questions.
Two key resources are the phenomenal growth of the platform engineering community and the community's main event, PlatformCon, which is growing in size every year. Add to that the rise of ** resources designed to help, and becoming a platform engineer is easier than ever. As platform engineering continues to grow and more businesses are on board, it's clear that there's never been a better time to start learning how to become a platform engineer.