Editor’s Note: The following is an article written for and published in DZone’s 2025 Trend Report, Developer Experience: The Coalescence of Developer Productivity, Process Satisfaction, and Platform Engineering.

How do we even start approaching platform engineering? The good news is that major organizations that have successfully adopted platform engineering have contributed their insights, best practices, and lessons learned to frameworks like the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) Platform Maturity Model and Microsoft’s Platform Engineering Capability Model. These models provide a structured pathway for organizations to evaluate their current state and identify gaps and actionable steps toward building an effective internal developer platform (IDP).