Platform engineering has shed its experimental veneer. What began as isolated attempts by infrastructure teams to tame cloud sprawl — ServiceNow tickets piling up, Terraform modules copy-pasted across repositories, engineers slacking each other at 11 PM about which IAM role grants ECR access — has calcified into something defensible, something you can budget for. Internal Developer Platforms aren’t theoretical anymore. They’re the substrate on which organizations either scale gracefully or collapse under their own tooling weight.

The shift feels less like a revolution and more like exhausted pragmatism. You build platforms because the alternative — letting every squad maintain its own Jenkins pipeline, its own Ansible playbooks, its own mental model of how secrets propagate from Vault to pods — becomes untenable somewhere between your third acquisition and your fiftieth microservice.