If You Think Platform Engineering Is Just DevOps, You’re Already Behind

Wix Engineering
13 hours ago
6 min read

Imagine starting your day as a senior engineering manager at a fast growing tech company. You’re barely through your first coffee when your phone lights up with a critical ticket. The Kubernetes environments don’t match across stages. DevOps is in place. CI/CD, automation, monitoring, on-call rotations. And still, developers spend more time fighting infrastructure than building products.

This is the moment many organizations mistakenly try to "add more DevOps."

In reality, this is the moment Platform Engineering begins, not as an upgraded version of DevOps, but as a separate discipline that treats the internal platform itself as a product. A discipline whose entire purpose is to remove infrastructure friction from the daily lives of developers so they can focus on what actually moves the business.

DevOps Builds Speed. Platform Engineering Builds the System

DevOps purpose was to be a cultural and operational movement: break silos, automate delivery, bring developers and operations closer together. It changed how teams work, and it worked.

Platform engineering starts where DevOps begins to strain.

Where DevOps focuses on accelerating delivery through collaboration and automation, platform engineering focuses on building reusable, self-service systems that completely hide operational complexity. Instead of every team needing deep knowledge of pipelines, networking, security, and deployment mechanics, those responsibilities are designed directly into a shared internal developer platform.

Engineers no longer ask - "How do I deploy this service?".

They ask - "Which golden path do I use?".

That shift is the difference between running infrastructure and designing an operating system.

Platform Engineering as a Business Specialty

Platform engineering becomes a specialization of its own, much like any other deep technical domain, heath-care, ad-tech, fintech. Gaming, etc... The difference is that the "product" here is not external, it is the company’s own production ecosystem.

In practice, platform engineers spend most of their time dealing with:

Kubernetes orchestration at scale
Workflow automation through GitHub or GitLab
Networking as a software construct
Progressive deployment strategies
Auditable, policy-driven change

This specialization is not about expanding DevOps.It is about owning the platform layer as a business capability, one that directly affects time-to-market, operational risk, and developer cognitive load.

Real-World Platform Engineering at Wix: Safe Production Changes in Practice

At Wix, this specialization is not theoretical. We build platforms that directly impact the business and are used daily by thousands of developers. A great example is our organization-wide approach to Safe Production Changes.

In simple terms, every production change must meet a strict standard: it must be managed as code, include an explicit rollback strategy, be rolled out gradually, and be continuously monitored throughout the process.

One area we identified as high-risk was load balancer configuration. Before our platform, these changes were executed manually by network engineers through the vendor’s control plane. This created operational risk, limited visibility, and made safe, repeatable change management nearly impossible. An example of such risk you can see with the recent outage of Microsoft Azure

To fix this, we ran a focused offsite with our network engineering team and applied an Event Storming discovery process based on Domain-Driven Design. The goal was not just to automate existing steps, but to extract the true business flow of a “safe network change.”

The result was a fully productized, end-to-end platform capability:

Load balancer configuration is now generated and managed entirely as code.
At the end of the CI process, engineers produce a deployable configuration artifact.
Deployment is executed through our internal developer portal.
From a single UI, engineers select the rollout strategy and the specific health checks that will govern the change.
Every deployment is connected to our centralized production state system, which continuously evaluates both technical signals and core business KPIs.
If the system detects abnormal impact, it can automatically halt or revert the change.

Today, every load balancer change at Wix is rolled out gradually, safely, and with full business awareness through the platform.

And here is the most important platform engineering principle in action: If we ever change load balancer vendors, the rollout experience will remain exactly the same. Only the configuration generation layer needs to change. The user experience, safety guarantees, and business logic are fully encapsulated by the platform.

This is not DevOps automation. This is platform engineering as a durable business abstraction.

Platform Engineering Manages Three Worlds at the Same Time

Platform engineers operate where these three domains meet.

Infrastructure.

Not just cloud resources, but containers, compute, storage, networking, identity, hybrid environments, resilience, and global traffic management. This is systems engineering at business scale.

Production and Reliability.

Safe deployments, progressive rollouts, blast-radius control, observability, automated recovery, and disciplined change management. This is not an operation. This is production engineering.

Developer Experience.

CI/CD pipelines, internal developer portals, golden paths, self-service infrastructure, secure-by-default workflows. This is where the platform becomes a force multiplier. The mission is simple: make the right way the easiest way.

This is what transforms internal tooling into a true product.

Platform Engineering as a Strategic Business Enabler

Companies like Google, AWS, Spotify demonstrate that platform engineering is not an operational afterthought, it is a core business capability.

What the world experiences as cloud services, APIs, or AI platforms is built on top of deeply engineered internal platforms that manage compute, networking, security, deployment, compliance, and cost at massive scale. Their ability to innovate quickly and commercialize complex technology safely is a direct outcome of their platform maturity.

What becomes clear when you are at scale, is that strong platforms are not just an efficiency play. They directly shape how quickly a company can grow and how safely it can monetize new products.

At Wix, we invest heavily in home-grown platform products that are tightly aligned with our specific scale, reliability, and regulatory requirements.

From systems that govern production change, deployments, and network routing to unified developer frameworks and paved roads, the platform functions as a cohesive control plane across the entire engineering stack. Instead of integrating dozens of open-source tools through bespoke automations, we operate a single, intentional platform where reliability, security, and velocity are enforced by design.

From DevOps Culture to Platform Scale

DevOps culture scales collaboration.

Platform engineering scales the company.

As organizations grow, hundreds of services, thousands of developers, multiple regions, regulatory pressure, constant delivery demand, culture alone is no longer enough. At some point, leadership realizes they are no longer just running systems. They are designing an ecosystem.

At some point, platform engineering becomes the only thing standing between uncontrolled operational chaos and sustainable delivery speed.

The mindset shifts from: "You build it, you run it".

To: "You build on it."

Product teams no longer need to be experts in Kubernetes, pipelines, or networking. They declare intent, consume paved roads, and ship business value - safe by default.

Where Technology Meets Strategy

Once the platform matures, it quietly begins to connect everything - velocity, safety, cost, security, revenue, and developer experience whether leadership planned for that outcome or not. In practice, it ties together domains that organizations traditionally manage and measure in isolation.

At that point, the platform starts answering executive-grade questions:

How risky is this change?

With a well-designed platform, you can map dependencies and understand the full cross-system impact of every production change before it happens.

How will this impact the business?

When infrastructure and application signals are connected to business KPIs, technical changes become business decisions. You shift from "I am upgrading a Kubernetes cluster named MEGATRON" to "I am upgrading the shops Kubernetes cluster to support higher transaction volume."

How fast can we safely scale?

Observability becomes a core capability of the platform. Once everything is visible, limits are known, bottlenecks are measurable, and capacity planning becomes proactive rather than reactive.

What happens to revenue if this system degrades?

FinOps becomes a natural extension of the platform. Revenue streams can be directly connected to the systems that generate them without living in a sea of spreadsheets.

This is why platform engineering is not a tooling effort.It is not “better DevOps.”It is a strategic engineering discipline.

Closing Thought

Building an internal platform used to be considered a nice-to-have. Today, it is a necessity for any company that wants to scale safely and with confidence. It’s best to start when you’re small, but the real risk is putting it off as the business grows.

Don’t chase only quick wins or glue together a collection of open-source tools. Ask the harder questions: How do we actually want to operate? What experience are we giving our developers? And how does this make us safer and faster to deliver?

DevOps reshaped how our teams collaborate. Platform engineering reshaped what the organization itself is capable of building safely. This wasn’t a gradual evolution for us - it was a deliberate shift in how we think about ownership, safety, and scale.

DevOps sets the methodology. Platform engineering builds the operating system that allows it to thrive.