Effective Platform Engineering

by Ajay Chankramath, Sean Alvarez, Bryan Oliver, Nic Cheneweth

Overview

Build the kind of software engineering platforms developers love to use!

An effective developer platform means one thing: productivity. Effective Platform Engineering introduces platform engineering as a discipline, teaching you what goes into a great developer platform and then showing you how to develop your own.

In Effective Platform Engineering, you’ll learn to deliver:

• Improved business outcomes
• Product management strategies
• Secure, scalable Kubernetes—based engineering platforms
• Effective Service Level Objectives to boost trust and adoption
• Modern control plane patterns that streamline developer workflows

Effective Platform Engineering shows you how to establish and administer the kind of platforms that reduce a dev team’s workload, improve consistency, and accelerate software delivery. Organized in three parts—foundations, building, and scaling—it blends mental models, patterns, and runnable examples to help you go from MVP to production—grade platform. You’ll learn how to treat platforms as products and demonstrate their value by improving engineering outcomes and delivering measurable business impact. You’ll love the book’s informed guidance and practical insights on satisfying stakeholders and driving organizational success.

Foreword by Kief Morris.

About the technology

Platform engineering is the discipline of building internal developer platforms (IDPs) that automate and simplify the software development lifecycle. IDPs provide self—service interfaces to tools and services for infrastructure, deployment, security, observability, and governance, and reduce the need for developers to master complex technologies like Kubernetes. Because they match the specific needs of an organization, well—engineered IDPs can reduce development time by half while delivering better software.

About the book

With Effective Platform Engineering you’ll be able to design, build, deploy, and scale a custom IDP. You’ll discover how platform engineering differs from DevOps and learn to create a platform that evolves with changing requirements. Diagrams, code samples, and exercises help you visualize important concepts. Along the way, you’ll explore critical topics like gathering requirements and establishing realistic service level agreements (SLAs).

What's inside

• Automated application workflows
• Scalable Kubernetes—based platforms
• A well—designed control plane
• Custom APIs

About the reader

For software engineers, SREs, and DevOps engineers.

About the author

Ajay Chankramath is the Founder and CEO of Platformetrics. Nic Cheneweth and Bryan Oliver are Principal Consultants at Thoughtworks. Sean Alvarez is the CTO of Life Sciences at Brillio.

Table of Contents

Part 1
1 What is platform engineering?
2 Software—defined products and architectures
3 Measuring your way to platform engineering success
Part 2
4 Governance, compliance, and trust
5 Evolutionary observability
6 Building a software—defined engineering platform
7 Platform control plane foundations
8 Control plane services and extensions
Part 3
9 Architecture changes to support scale
10 Platform product evolution
A Solutions to the exercises

Get a free eBook (PDF or ePub) from Manning as well as access to the online liveBook format (and its AI assistant that will answer your questions in any language) when you purchase the print book.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781633436497
Publisher:	Manning
Publication date:	11/04/2025
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	7.38(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Ajay Chankramath is CTO & Managing Director of Platform & Products at Brillio with 30+ years of experience as a technology visionary in platform engineering. He is a frequent speaker at global conferences, author of influential pieces, and co—holder of a foundational patent in the field.

Sean Alvarez is CTO of Life Sciences at Brillio. He holds an M.S. in computer science and an MBA, has led multiple enterprise—scale platform engineering transformations across cloud vendors, and is a recognized industry speaker.

Bryan Oliver is an experienced engineer and leader specializing in distributed systems. He is a member of Thoughtworks' Platform Engineering team, focusing on Cloud—Native platforms, and an active open source contributor and international conference speaker.

Nic Cheneweth is a Principal Consultant at Thoughtworks and founding infrastructure contributor to Digital Platform Strategy. He holds degrees in computer science and software engineering, an MBA, plus doctorate and post—doctorate degrees, with 30 years of diverse experience spanning executive leadership, consulting, and engineering roles.