Table of contents
- What is DevOps?
- What is Platform Engineering?
- What does a platform engineer do?
- Platform engineering vs DevOps: Key differences
- Comparison table: Platform engineering vs DevOps
- Graphite and accelerating code reviews
- Conclusion
DevOps and platform engineering are two key paradigms in modern software delivery. A common question is "is platform engineering the same as DevOps?" The short answer is no – while they share the goal of improving software delivery, they differ in focus and approach. DevOps is a broad cultural and operational movement emphasizing collaboration and automation across development and IT operations, whereas platform engineering centers on building internal platforms and tools that enable developers to self-service their infrastructure needs. In this article, we define both terms, explore platform engineering vs DevOps in depth, discuss what a platform engineer does, and examine how tools like can assist with code reviews.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a combination of "development" and "operations," signifying a cultural shift to bridge the gap between software development and IT operations. The primary goal of DevOps is to shorten the software development life cycle while delivering features and fixes rapidly in alignment with business objectives. In practice, DevOps involves continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, infrastructure as code, automated testing, and monitoring – all aimed at faster and more reliable releases. Importantly, DevOps is as much about culture as it is about tools; it requires a mindset of collaboration and shared ownership across the entire software lifecycle.
What is platform engineering?
Platform engineering is a discipline focused on designing and building internal platforms that developers use to deploy and run applications. In other words, platform engineering creates a single, centralized platform to support development and operations. The goal is to provide a stable, self-service infrastructure layer that abstracts away complexity so developers can focus on coding and product features rather than environment setup or infrastructure plumbing. Platform engineering can be viewed as an evolution of DevOps with a product mindset: the internal developer platform (IDP) is treated like a product for developers, and the platform team iterates on it based on feedback to continually improve developer experience and productivity.
What does a platform engineer do?
A platform engineer is responsible for building and maintaining the internal platforms that support software delivery. This role blends aspects of infrastructure, automation, and developer experience. In practice, what does a platform engineer do? Typical responsibilities include:
- Designing and provisioning infrastructure: Setting up scalable infrastructure components (compute, networking, storage, cloud services) and managing them as code.
- Building self-service tools and workflows: Developing self-service interfaces (portals, APIs) and automating CI/CD pipelines, testing, and monitoring. This approach bakes in best practices (security, compliance, etc.) and reduces developers' cognitive load.
By taking on these tasks, platform engineers free developers to focus on delivering business value instead of reinventing environment setups or deployment pipelines for each project.
Platform engineering vs DevOps: Key differences
Although DevOps and platform engineering share similar goals, they take different approaches. Put simply, DevOps focuses on how work gets done (through culture, processes, and automation), whereas platform engineering focuses on what is provided (an internal platform of tools and environments) to enable that work. The table below summarizes key differences between the two practices:
Comparison table: Platform engineering vs DevOps
The table below summarizes some key differences between DevOps and platform engineering:
| Aspect | DevOps (Approach) | Platform Engineering (Discipline) |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Foster collaboration between dev and ops to accelerate delivery (culture & process focus) | Build and maintain an internal developer platform (IDP) to streamline development and deployments (product focus) |
| Team structure | Cross-functional teams; shared responsibility across development and operations teams | Dedicated platform team focused on supporting developers' infrastructure and tooling needs |
| Primary focus | Processes and automation to enable continuous delivery | Infrastructure, developer tools, and self-service capabilities to improve developer experience |
| Key outcomes | Indirect improvements (faster deploys, fewer failures) via better collaboration and practices | Direct improvements in developer productivity and satisfaction by providing useful tools and streamlined workflows |
Graphite and accelerating code reviews
Graphite is an example of a tool that addresses a common bottleneck in DevOps: code reviews. Graphite provides an AI-driven code reviewer, Diamond that automatically catches bugs and suggests fixes on pull requests. It delivers feedback up to 40× faster than a manual review (cutting the review cycle from about 1 hour to 90 seconds), giving developers immediate, actionable suggestions for improvement. By speeding up the code review process, Graphite helps teams maintain code quality while accelerating their delivery cycles, making it a valuable addition to both DevOps pipelines and platform engineering toolkits.
Conclusion
Platform engineering and DevOps are complementary strategies rather than competing ones. DevOps establishes a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement, while platform engineering provides the infrastructure and tools to support that culture at scale. Implementing DevOps practices without a cohesive platform can lead to fragmented tooling and high cognitive load for developers; conversely, adopting platform engineering without DevOps culture might result in great tools that nobody fully utilizes. In practice, many organizations begin with DevOps initiatives and then introduce platform engineering to further reduce complexity and improve developer productivity. By leveraging both approaches – and automating with modern tools (for example, using Graphite to streamline code reviews) – organizations can keep developers happy while delivering software efficiently and reliably.