In today's rapidly evolving technology world, organizations are faced with unprecedented challenges in managing complex cloud infrastructure and application deployments. The traditional approaches to managing infrastructure—silos, manual processes, and ad-hoc solutions—are insufficient to provide what software development today requires.
Enter Platform as a Product (PaaP), a groundbreaking model that is transforming the manner in which organizations develop their internal developer platforms. Through the application of product thinking principles to platform engineering, companies are creating more cohesive, user-centered, and value-driven platforms that accelerate innovation more quickly while reducing operational complexity.
This authoritative manual explains the fundamentals of Platform as a Product, and it provides the organizations starting this journey in 2025 and beyond with a full foundation.
What is Platform as a Product?
Essentially, Platform as a Product is a paradigm shift in the manner in which organizations conceptualize and develop internal platforms. Rather than viewing platforms as a collection of tools and technologies, the PaaP philosophy conceives of platforms as products with:
- Clearly defined users (typically developers and other technical stakeholders)
- Well-articulated value propositions to real problems
- Quantifiable outcomes tied to business objectives
- Mindful user experiences designed with empathy for developers
- Constant innovation fueled by customer input and changing needs
This shift moves platform teams out of being infrastructure providers or cost centers and positions them as product teams delivering continuous value to their internal customers—the app developers and teams building apps on their platforms.
Why Platform as a Product Matters in 2025
Platform as a Product principles have picked up pace of adoption over the past couple of years for some compelling reasons:
1. Growing Complexity of the Cloud-Native Ecosystem
The rise of cloud services, Kubernetes distributions, and the corresponding ecosystem of tooling has placed high cognitive demand on developers. Organizations need an approach to insulate against such complexity without surrendering flexibility and control.
2. The Developer Experience Imperative
Developer experience has emerged as a top competitive advantage for companies looking to hire and keep technical talent. By considering platforms as products, organizations can craft user-friendly, delightful experiences that increase developers' productivity and happiness.
3. Scale and Standardization Challenges
As businesses grow, the lack of standardized infrastructure and deployment processes brings inconsistency, security risks, and operational inefficiencies. Platform as a Product allows for building standards while managing evolving needs.
4. Business Agility Requirements
In the fast-changing market of today, it is most essential to be able to deliver value to customers in a quick way. Platforms based on product thinking principles enable teams to innovate quicker by reducing the cognitive weight and tedium of infrastructure management.
Common Use Cases for Platform as a Product
Organizations across various industries are finding compelling applications for the Platform as a Product approach. These use cases demonstrate how PaaP principles can address specific challenges while delivering tangible business value:
1. Application Modernization Programs
Many enterprises find themselves with legacy applications that need to be modernized for the cloud era. A platform product built with modernization in mind provides standardized tools, frameworks, and migration paths that accelerate this journey. These platforms typically include:
- Containerization toolchains that simplify the process of moving monolithic applications to containers
- Service mesh implementations that enable modern networking capabilities for legacy services
- Standardized CI/CD pipelines that accommodate both legacy and cloud-native deployment patterns
- Progressive migration paths that allow teams to modernize at their own pace while following established best practices
By implementing a platform product for modernization, organizations can transform their application portfolios more efficiently, with greater consistency and reduced risk.
2. Multi-Cloud Orchestration
As organizations adopt multiple cloud providers to avoid vendor lock-in or leverage unique capabilities, managing this complexity becomes increasingly challenging. Platform products designed for multi-cloud scenarios provide:
- Consistent interfaces for provisioning and managing resources across cloud providers
- Abstraction layers that normalize differences in cloud provider APIs and services
- Security controls and governance that apply consistently regardless of underlying infrastructure
- Cost management and optimization tools that work across cloud environments
Taikun CloudWorks exemplifies this use case, providing a unified control plane that simplifies multi-cloud Kubernetes management while preserving the flexibility to leverage each cloud's unique strengths.
3. Developer Onboarding and Productivity
Organizations focused on developer experience often implement platform products specifically to accelerate onboarding and enhance productivity. These platforms typically offer:
- Self-service developer portals that provide access to pre-approved resources and services
- Integrated documentation and learning resources that help developers understand best practices
- Standardized project templates and boilerplates that embody organizational standards
- Development environments that can be provisioned in minutes rather than days or weeks
By reducing the time it takes for new developers to become productive and eliminating common friction points in the development process, these platforms deliver measurable value through improved velocity and developer satisfaction.
4. Security and Compliance Automation
For organizations in regulated industries or with strict security requirements, platforms can embed security and compliance controls into the development workflow. These platforms typically include:
- Pre-approved, security-hardened infrastructure templates and application components
- Automated security scanning integrated into CI/CD pipelines
- Compliance dashboards that provide visibility into the organization's security posture
- Policy enforcement mechanisms that prevent non-compliant resources from being deployed
By shifting security left and making it an integral part of the platform, organizations can maintain compliance while reducing the burden on development teams.
5. Internal Developer Marketplaces
More mature platform organizations often create internal marketplaces where teams can publish and consume reusable components, services, and tools. These marketplaces facilitate:
- Knowledge sharing and collaboration across team boundaries
- Reuse of proven solutions rather than reinventing the wheel
- Discovery of internal capabilities that teams might otherwise not know about
- Standardization through the promotion of preferred approaches and technologies
These marketplaces apply product thinking not just to the platform itself but also to the components built on top of it, creating a multiplier effect that increases the platform's value.
6. Edge Computing and IoT Platforms
Organizations deploying applications across distributed edge locations face unique challenges that platform products can address. These platforms typically provide:
- Centralized management of distributed infrastructure spanning cloud and edge locations
- Specialized deployment patterns for constrained environments
- Synchronization mechanisms for intermittently connected devices
- Monitoring and observability across the entire deployment topology
By abstracting the complexity of edge deployments, these platforms enable teams to focus on building applications rather than managing distributed infrastructure.
Each of these use cases represents a specific application of Platform as a Product principles to solve organizational challenges. By identifying which use cases align most closely with your organization's needs, you can focus your platform efforts on delivering maximum value.
Core Principles of Platform as a Product
Comparing Traditional Infrastructure vs. Platform as a Product Approaches
The following table illustrates the fundamental differences between traditional infrastructure management and the Platform as a Product approach:
This shift in approach fundamentally changes how platforms are built, managed, and evolved within organizations. By adopting product thinking, platform teams can create solutions that developers actively want to use rather than platforms they are required to use.
Successful implementation of Platform as a Product relies on several core principles:
1. User-Centricity
Platforms must be designed from an intimate understanding of user needs, pain points, and workflows. This entails ongoing engagement with developers through interviews, questionnaires, and onsite observation.
2. Value-Driven Development
Every platform feature or capability should contribute clear value to the business as well as the users. Platform teams must be able to articulate how their output contributes to organizational objectives like speed of delivery, quality, or reduced cost.
3. Self-Service by Design
Great platforms facilitate developers to utilize resources and capabilities without dependency on platform teams. Self-service avoids bottlenecks and enables developers to work as effectively as they desire.
4. Continuous Feedback Loops
Just like any product, platforms must evolve based on user feedback and evolving needs. Feedback-gathering mechanisms, analyzing mechanisms, and action mechanisms are essential for great platforms.
5. Paved Roads and Golden Paths
While platforms are required to deliver flexibility, they also have to create strongly supported, clear common usage paths. These "golden paths" make seamless adoption of best practices at lower cognitive loads available to teams
The Shift from Infrastructure to Platform as a Product
Understanding the evolution to arrive at this point is important to frame for organizations making the journey:
Old-School Infrastructure Management
In the past, infrastructure was addressed manually by specialist teams. Tickets would be given by developers requesting resources, at times taking days or weeks to provision.
The DevOps Movement
DevOps was born as a way to eradicate silos between operations and development, emphasizing collaboration and automation. This transformation served teams better in managing infrastructure but had the effect of developing undifferentiated solutions within an organization.
The Rise of Platform Engineering
As organizations started leveraging cloud-native platforms like Kubernetes, a need for specialist expertise arose. Platform engineering teams emerged to construct internal platforms that hid complexity and provided common means of doing common things.
Platform as a Product Emerges
The final evolution came when companies realized that building platforms wasn't enough—they needed to drive adoption and provide value. By applying product thinking to platforms, companies began building more developer-focused, value-driven solutions that developers wanted to use.
Key Stakeholders in the Platform as a Product Approach
A successful Platform as a Product initiative involves several stakeholders with different perspectives and needs:
Platform Teams
These cross-functional teams operate and build the platform, typically consisting of infrastructure-experienced engineers, security experts, developer experience engineers, and product managers.
Developer Teams
Being the most critical users of the platform, developer teams need efficient, user-friendly tools and services that facilitate them to create business value more effectively.
Operations and SRE Teams
These groups make the platform as well as applications developed above it stable and responsive, generally working in collaboration with platform groups to develop best practices.
Security and Compliance Teams
Security professionals aid in making platforms support teams design secure applications by default by incorporating security controls and practices into platform functionality.
Business Leaders
Executives and business leaders are concerned with how platforms accelerate business outcomes quicker, improve quality, and reduce software delivery risks.
Building a Foundation for Platform as a Product Success
For those organizations looking to adopt Platform as a Product principles, some underlying elements are required:
1. Organizational Alignment
Success is a matter of getting technical and business groups together around seeing the value in a product strategy to platforms. This is most often education, stakeholder feedback, and simple communication about desired outcomes.
2. Platform Vision and Strategy
A solid vision outlines what the platform will do and how the platform will create value for the users and firm. The platform vision guides development and influences investing priorities.
3. User Research and Personas
Knowing the users of the platform through research and persona development ensures that platform functionality aligns with real needs, not perceived needs.
4. Governance and Operating Model
Good governance arrangements detail how decisions about the platform are made so that it evolves in a way that is balanced between standardization and flexibility.
5. Metrics and Measurement
Having critical metrics, both for platform performance and for its impact on business outcomes, presents itself to continued refinement and to demonstrating the value of the platform to stakeholders.
Conclusion: Embarking on Your Platform as a Product Journey
The shift towards treating platforms as products is a significant paradigm shift in how organizations deal with internal tooling and infrastructure. Through the adoption of the principles in this guide, companies can develop platforms that truly serve developers' needs while driving organizational objectives.
In the subsequent parts of this series, we'll explore:
- The key components and benefits of the Platform as a Product approach
- Implementation strategies using Taikun CloudWorks
- Future trends and innovations shaping the evolution of platforms
As you make plans for your organization's platform engineering in 2025, remember that the most effective platforms are not simply collections of technologies—they are well-designed products designed to be delightful to use and deliver concrete value to the business.
