Platform engineering creates the standardised infrastructure, tooling, and self-service capabilities that development teams use to deploy and manage applications.
This matters when organisations have multiple development teams, need consistent infrastructure across projects, or want to enforce security and compliance policies through automation rather than manual reviews. Platform engineering reduces the time from “we need infrastructure” to “we’re deploying code” from weeks to hours.
What Platform Engineering Delivers
Multi-Account AWS Estate Architecture
AWS Organizations setup providing isolated AWS accounts for different teams, environments, or business units. The account structure depends on your organisational needs - not every organisation requires the same pattern. Common structures include accounts separated by environment (development, staging, production), by team or product, or by compliance boundary (PCI-compliant workloads isolated from general infrastructure).
This includes centralised billing and cost allocation, cross-account IAM roles for controlled access between accounts, service control policies for governance and security guardrails, and CloudTrail logging centralised to a security account for audit and compliance.
Reusable Terraform Infrastructure Modules
Terraform modules that encapsulate AWS infrastructure patterns and best practices. Development teams consume these modules rather than writing infrastructure from scratch, ensuring consistency and reducing duplication. Modules are configured through tfvars files or Terraform locals depending on organisational preferences and existing practices.
Common modules include VPC configurations with public and private subnets, NAT gateways, and routing tables configured for different use cases. RDS database configurations with backup policies, parameter groups, and security group rules. ECS task definitions and services for containerised applications. KMS keys with appropriate key policies for encryption. S3 buckets with bucket policies, versioning, encryption, and lifecycle rules. CloudTrail configurations for audit logging across accounts.
Modules are versioned and tested, allowing teams to adopt updates when appropriate rather than being forced to use the latest version immediately. This balances standardisation with team autonomy.
GitHub Actions CI/CD Templates
Templated GitHub Actions workflows that development teams can adopt for their repositories. These provide automated build, test, security scanning, and deployment pipelines without teams needing to become CI/CD experts.
Common patterns include Docker image builds with automated tagging, pushing to Amazon ECR, and scanning for vulnerabilities. Terraform workflows with plan on pull request, security scanning via tfsec or Checkov, environment-specific gating (requiring approval before production deployments), and automated apply after approval. Application deployment workflows for ECS services, Lambda functions, or other AWS compute targets.
Security scanning and compliance checks are built into pipelines rather than being manual steps, ensuring every deployment meets security standards before reaching production.
Secrets and Configuration Management
Secrets management using HashiCorp Vault or AWS Secrets Manager for sensitive values like database passwords, API keys, and certificates. Non-sensitive configuration values stored in AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store for easy access by applications and infrastructure.
This centralises secrets rather than scattering them across repositories or hardcoding in infrastructure, while maintaining appropriate access controls through IAM policies.
Backend Platform Infrastructure
The infrastructure that supports development teams rather than customer-facing applications. This includes centralised logging and monitoring, shared CI/CD runners or build infrastructure, artifact repositories (ECR for Docker images), Terraform state backends with locking (S3 and DynamoDB), VPN or bastion infrastructure for secure access, and networking infrastructure connecting different accounts or environments.
Backend platform work ensures development teams have the foundational infrastructure they need without each team building and maintaining their own versions.
Why Platform Engineering Matters
Without platform engineering, every development team rebuilds the same infrastructure patterns, leading to inconsistency, security gaps, and wasted effort. One team configures RDS with proper backup policies while another forgets automated backups. One team implements comprehensive CloudTrail logging while another has gaps in audit trails. One team sets up automated deployments while another manually provisions infrastructure.
Platform engineering solves this through standardisation and automation. Security policies, compliance requirements, and operational best practices are encoded in Terraform modules and CI/CD templates rather than documented in wikis that teams may or may not follow. When a security improvement is needed, updating a shared module fixes it for every team using that module rather than requiring individual teams to implement changes.
This becomes critical as organisations scale. A platform team of two or three engineers can support dozens of development teams through shared infrastructure and automation, whereas a model of embedding DevOps engineers in every team requires linear scaling of headcount with development teams.
Approach to Platform Engineering Engagements
Platform engineering work is often mixed with infrastructure engineering, working on both the implementation of specific infrastructure for projects and the development of backend platform capabilities that multiple teams consume. This dual focus ensures platform components solve real problems rather than theoretical needs.
Engagements typically start with understanding existing infrastructure patterns, pain points development teams face, and organisational constraints (compliance requirements, existing tooling, team preferences). This assessment identifies whether the highest value comes from multi-account structure, reusable infrastructure modules, CI/CD automation, or centralised backend services.
Implementation is iterative. Build and validate capabilities with one or two teams, gather feedback on what works and what needs adjustment, refine based on actual usage patterns, then roll out to additional teams. Platform engineering requires ongoing refinement as AWS services evolve, organisational needs change, and teams discover new requirements.
The deliverables vary by engagement but commonly include Terraform modules with documentation and examples, GitHub Actions workflow templates ready for teams to adopt, AWS Organizations account structure with appropriate policies and cross-account roles, centralised secrets management implementation, and documentation covering how teams consume platform capabilities.
Technologies and Tools
Core technologies include Terraform for infrastructure as code, AWS Organizations for multi-account management, GitHub Actions for CI/CD automation, HashiCorp Vault or AWS Secrets Manager for secrets management, AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store for configuration, Docker and Amazon ECR for containerisation, Amazon ECS for container orchestration, and AWS services including VPC, RDS, KMS, S3, CloudTrail, IAM, and CloudWatch.
Security is integrated throughout with automated scanning in CI/CD pipelines (tfsec, Checkov, container vulnerability scanning), infrastructure validation before deployment, environment gating requiring approval for production changes, and centralised audit logging via CloudTrail.
When You Need Platform Engineering
Platform engineering becomes valuable when you have multiple development teams needing similar infrastructure, inconsistent infrastructure patterns causing operational or security issues, slow provisioning of new environments or projects, difficulty enforcing security and compliance policies across teams, or limited DevOps capacity that can’t scale with development team growth.
Organisations building new AWS estates from scratch benefit from platform engineering establishing patterns correctly from the start rather than retrofitting standardisation later. Organisations with existing AWS infrastructure benefit from consolidating and standardising what currently exists, reducing complexity and improving security.
Platform engineering is infrastructure engineering with a focus on reusability, automation, and enabling development teams to move faster while maintaining security and compliance. If your development teams are spending significant time on infrastructure rather than building product features, platform engineering can shift that balance.
For platform engineering engagements, contact Digital Endeavours to discuss your specific requirements and how standardised infrastructure and automation can support your development teams.
