Platform engineering has gone through multiple iterations over the years. First, there was the split between Development and Operations, a model that broke the flow of value by creating dependencies, bottlenecks, and misaligned incentives. Then came DevOps, a movement that aimed to bridge the gap, but often resulted in teams taking on more responsibilities than they could sustainably manage, leading to inefficiencies and even security risks.
To solve these challenges, Platform Teams emerged. Their mission? To provide self-service infrastructure, tooling, and workflows that help developers ship faster and more safely. However, as organisations scaled, platform teams found themselves overwhelmed, collapsing under the weight of demand as they tried to be the single point of control for everything.
Enter the concept of the Platform Group. This structure acknowledges that the boundaries of platform engineering are not rigid. Instead of a single team acting as the gatekeeper, multiple teams collaborate—some closer to infrastructure, others focusing on developer enablement. But even within this model, a key question remains: Who is a producer, and who is a consumer? Who defines business rules across services? And does it make sense to keep drawing such hard lines between platform builders and platform users?
What If Your Platform Was a Democracy?
What if we moved beyond the idea of strict ownership and control? What if everyone could participate in shaping the platform, not just a central team? Imagine if internal platforms worked in multiplayer mode, where the production and consumption of platform capabilities were democratised.
This is the vision of Platform Democracy: a model where developers, security teams, SREs, and even external service providers collaborate seamlessly, instead of waiting on a central platform team to deliver everything.
Producers and Consumers: A New Perspective
To achieve Platform Democracy, we need to rethink the roles of producers and consumers within an internal platform:
- Producers: These are teams that create and maintain services. But they aren’t just the central platform team. Producers can be:
- External providers offering managed services.
- Internal teams build custom tools, APIs, or infrastructure components.
- Compliance and security engineers ensure governance and policy adherence.
- Consumers: These are teams that consume platform services. Their expectations are clear:
- Fast – They need services on demand, not through tickets or informal requests.
- Safe – They should never feel like using a platform-provided service puts them at risk of failure, compliance issues, or job insecurity.
- Efficient – The platform should help them work at a higher level of abstraction, reducing toil and cognitive load.
The Future of Platform Engineering Is Democratic
If the goal is to empower everyone to quickly, safely, and efficiently produce and consume platform capabilities, how do we get there? The basic building blocks need to include:
- Promises – A contract-driven approach that lets teams buy, build, or blend platform capabilities based on their needs.
- Plugins – A mechanism for ensuring security and compliance without slowing teams down.
- Fleet Upgrades – A way to continuously improve the platform without forcing disruptive migrations.
Enabling Platform Democracy with Kratix
As platform engineering matures, the organizations that succeed won’t be the ones that rely on centralized, bottlenecked teams. Instead, they’ll be the ones that embrace Platform Democracy, enabling developers, platform engineers, security teams, and even external providers to participate in building and maintaining internal platforms.
Platform orchestrators like Kratix provide the foundational building blocks for this shift. Kratix enables organizations to move from top-down control to collaborative, scalable platform engineering, ensuring that platform capabilities evolve dynamically as needs change.