Platform as a Service: Why Platform Teams Are Not Just About Tools
If you’ve ever worked on a Platform team, you know the existential question that hangs over us: what exactly do we do for developers? It sounds obvious at first. We empower teams with automation. We build tools. We provide a golden path that everyone is supposed to walk. It’s a nice pitch, but reality is a little messier. Just because you build something doesn’t mean anybody will use it.
You can have the slickest dashboard in the world, the fanciest vulnerability scanner, or the most elegant CI/CD pipeline. You can give it a name, slap a logo on it, and write a breathless Confluence page about how it will “accelerate innovation across the org.” But if developers don’t have the time, the expertise, or the resources to plug those things into their actual workflows, it will sit there unused. Great tooling without adoption is like a Ferrari parked in a garage without keys.
When I joined a new team tasked with providing platform and devops support to developer teams, the first thing we asked ourselves was: what exactly does “support” mean? To some people, it meant “fix my Jenkins job.” To others, it meant “write Terraform for me.” To others still, it meant “build me a magic system that does everything automatically while I sleep.” The word was so vague it could mean anything from being an on-call firefighter to being a full-time consultant embedded in another team.
So we started digging. And what we found was eye-opening.
Many of the dev teams had been left to their own devices for years. Without guidance, they had built CI/CD solutions in an ad hoc manner, cobbling together whatever tools they had on hand. Some were still using Jenkins jobs duct-taped together with shell scripts. Some had legacy systems that hadn’t been updated in years. Others had half-finished attempts at GitHub Actions or TeamCity, stitched together by engineers who were no longer even at the company. The result was a patchwork quilt of pipelines, each unique, each fragile, and each missing the basic features you’d expect in a modern build system.
Things like metrics, observability, concurrency, dashboards, or even the ability to recover state after a failure were often nonexistent. Every team had a different setup, which meant nobody could really help each other. If the one person who wrote the original pipeline left, the rest of the team was often stuck staring at scripts they didn’t understand. Pipelines broke frequently, builds failed without explanation, and there was no consistency from team to team.
This wasn’t laziness. It was survival. Developers had features to ship, bugs to fix, and customers to support. When they needed a pipeline, they built the fastest thing that worked well enough, and then moved on. They didn’t have time to polish it or align it with best practices. They just needed it to run.
So the question for us as a Platform team was clear: how do we get buy-in from these teams when their houses are already built on shaky foundations? The answer: carrots. Lots of carrots.
Our strategy was not to throw tools over the wall and hope for the best. Instead, we worked side by side with dev teams. We started by sitting down with each team, listening to how their current systems worked, and documenting what they had. Then we wrote up proposals: here’s where your setup is today, here’s where it could be, and here’s how we can help you get there.
The proposal wasn’t just theory. It was a working pipeline delivered to them. We chose a common language, Gradle, for scripting and modules. Gradle gave us flexibility, extensibility, and, most importantly, consistency. With everyone using the same basic approach, teams could finally support each other. If one team figured out how to handle integration tests in parallel, that knowledge could be shared and reused. Instead of isolated snowflakes, teams now had a common backbone.
We also didn’t reinvent the wheel. If a tool already existed — dashboards, log shipping, vulnerability scanning — we integrated it. The goal wasn’t to create more tools. The goal was to glue everything together so teams could actually use it. The pipelines we delivered came with concurrency, observability, selectability, dashboards, and stability. They weren’t perfect, but they were far better than the fragile homegrown systems they replaced.
Delivery was just the first step. We provided training sessions so developers knew how to use the new pipelines. We stuck around for support. We answered questions, debugged issues, and tweaked things as needed. But here’s the interesting thing: once the pipelines were adopted, the level of support we had to provide dropped off dramatically. Teams got comfortable with the system. They understood how it worked. And because they were all using the same foundation, they could help each other. Knowledge became transferable. Standards created community.
That’s when the magic happens. A Platform team isn’t successful when every dev team files tickets begging for help. A Platform team is successful when dev teams barely need to think about the platform at all.
And that’s the real lesson. Platform is not just about building shiny tools. It’s not about automation for automation’s sake. It’s about customer service. It’s about understanding the actual needs of developers, meeting them where they are, and delivering solutions they can use today. Automation and standards matter, but they only matter if people can and will use them.
So what does a Platform team actually do? We don’t just build tools. We build adoption. We build trust. We build systems that work in the real world, not just in an architecture diagram. And if we do it right, we build ourselves out of the critical path. The measure of success is when developers have stable, reliable pipelines, share knowledge across teams, and barely even notice the platform team behind it all.
That’s when you know you’re doing the job right.
