Platform Engineering in 2026: Why DIY Is Dead

The software industry loves a good pendulum swing. For decades, we watched as centralized IT teams controlled every aspect of infrastructure, then witnessed the dramatic DevOps revolution that pushed that responsibility directly onto developers. Now, as organizations grapple with the consequences of both extremes, Platform Engineering is being touted as the discipline that finally gets the balance right.

Gartner forecasts that by 2026, 80% of large software engineering organizations will establish platform teams as internal providers of reusable services, components, and tools for application delivery, up from 45% in 2022. The CNCF Backstage project now boasts over 3,400 adopters worldwide. What started as a bunch of internal teams hacking together their own tools has turned into a mature discipline with established best practices, dedicated conferences, and a rapidly consolidating technology landscape.

For VPs of Engineering and Platform Engineering leads who have moved beyond the "why do we need this" phase, the question now is: how do we mature this practice without getting stuck in endless portal maintenance?

The Evolution of Platform Engineering

To understand where we are going, we must briefly understand how we got here. We have moved from the "Ticket Queue" era (where centralized IT provided stability but strangled velocity) to the "DevOps Revolution," where developers gained speed but drowned in infrastructure complexity.

Platform Engineering represents the synthesis of these two extremes. It centralizes complexity without removing autonomy. Platform teams build and maintain the underlying infrastructure, but they expose it through self-service interfaces. This allows developers to move quickly without needing to master every implementation detail, effectively treating the platform as a product with developers as customers.

From Infrastructure to Interfaces

Early platform engineering efforts focused heavily on infrastructure primitives. Teams invested enormous energy in standardizing Kubernetes deployments, building CI/CD pipelines, and creating Infrastructure as Code templates. These were necessary foundations, but they were not sufficient for driving developer adoption.

The modern Platform Engineering conversation has shifted decisively toward Developer Experience. The infrastructure layer still matters, but what sets teams apart is how they present that infrastructure to developers. That's why Internal Developer Portals (IDPs) have become popular.

The Rise of the IDP

An IDP is the storefront of your platform. It gives developers a unified interface to discover services, access documentation, spin up new projects from templates, and view their deployments. Without this interface layer, even the most sophisticated platform remains opaque and underutilized.

While various tools exist, the market has overwhelmingly converged on a single standard. Recent analysis indicates Backstage holds approximately 89% market share among organizations that have adopted an IDP. Originally developed by Spotify and now a CNCF project, it has moved from early experimentation to essential infrastructure.

This dominance is reflected in the project's momentum. Backstage now boasts over 270 public adopters , including global brands like LinkedIn, CVS Health, and Vodafone. It was also the top CNCF project by end-user commits and the fourth most contributed-to CNCF project in 2024, trailing only infrastructure giants like Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, and Argo.

Platform as a Product: From Philosophy to Practice

The shift to "Platform as a Product" marks a critical maturity point in Platform Engineering. Instead of mandating tools, modern platform teams treat developers as customers, using a competitive dynamic to force a relentless focus on value delivery.

This approach manifests in two concrete practices:

Golden Paths

Rather than offering infinite flexibility, platform teams curate Golden Paths, opinionated, well-supported pathways for common tasks. These paths come with excellent documentation, proven templates, and integrated tooling. Developers can deviate when necessary, but the "Golden Path" represents the path of least resistance and highest support.

Measuring Success

Success measurement has fundamentally changed. Uptime is no longer the only metric that matters. Leading teams now track impact using:

• Adoption rates: Are developers voluntarily choosing the platform?
• Time-to-hello-world: How fast can a new engineer deploy code?
• DORA metrics: Tracking deployment frequency and lead time for changes.
• Satisfaction scores: Using frameworks like SPACE to measure developer sentiment.

For example, Spotify reported that their time-to-tenth-pull-request metric for new developers dropped by 55% after deploying Backstage.

The Tooling Landscape: Consolidation and Standardization

The Platform Engineering technology stack has matured into defined categories. The infrastructure stack is well-defined: cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) at the bottom, Kubernetes for orchestration, and Terraform for Infrastructure as Code. Increasingly, Backstage or a commercial derivative serves as the interface layer on top. Gartner's Hype Cycle for Platform Engineering now tracks dozens of technologies across this stack, reflecting the maturity of the space.

This consolidation is creating a dilemma for the interface layer: Build vs. Buy. Organizations must choose between self-hosting Backstage, purchasing a commercial offering, or using a managed Backstage solution.

Self-hosting Backstage provides maximum flexibility but comes with significant costs. Industry observers report common pitfalls including:

• Long time-to-value: Teams often spend 6-12 months on setup, with complex implementations extending to 18+ months.
• Maintenance burden: The plugin architecture requires continuous maintenance, and breaking changes in recent releases have created upgrade challenges.
• Low adoption: Organizations outside of Spotify struggle with adoption , with average internal rates hovering around 10%—often because teams burn out on maintenance before delivering features developers actually want.

This is not a failing of Backstage itself, but rather a reflection of the reality that building and maintaining a production-quality developer portal requires dedicated ongoing investment. Many organizations discover that maintaining the portal consumes so much of their platform team's capacity that they never get to building the unique platform capabilities that would actually differentiate their developer experience.

Commercial and managed offerings address this challenge. Several alternatives exist in the IDP market, each with different approaches and strengths:

• Solutions like Roadie provide Backstage as a service, eliminating the operational overhead while preserving the extensibility and ecosystem compatibility that make Backstage attractive.
• Red Hat Developer Hub offers an enterprise-grade alternative for organizations already invested in the Red Hat ecosystem.
• Platforms like Port, Cortex, and OpsLevel provide different architectural approaches to the IDP challenge, while Humanitec focuses on platform orchestration.

These approaches allow platform teams to skip directly from concept to value delivery, focusing their energy on the platform logic and Golden Paths that are unique to their organization rather than on maintaining commodity infrastructure.

The Future: AI and the Intelligent Platform

The integration of AI into IDPs is the next frontier for Platform Engineering. Gartner predicts that by 2028, 90% of enterprise software engineers will use AI code assistants, up from less than 14% in early 2024. The role of developers is shifting from implementation to orchestration, focusing on problem-solving and system design. Early implementations are already showing promising results, and the trajectory suggests fundamental changes to how developers interact with their platforms.

Model Context Protocol

The Model Context Protocol (MCP), introduced by Anthropic and rapidly gaining adoption, provides a standardized approach for connecting AI systems with data sources and tools. Platform teams are beginning to expose their capabilities through MCP servers, enabling developers to interact with their platforms using natural language through AI assistants. Rather than navigating a web interface to provision a new service, a developer can simply describe what they need in conversation with an AI agent that understands the organization's platform capabilities.

Agentic AI

Agentic AI takes this further. Instead of passively waiting for developer requests, intelligent platform agents can proactively identify issues, suggest optimizations, and implement routine fixes autonomously. This shifts the platform team's role from building tools to defining the rules and organizational knowledge that enable these agents to operate safely.

These capabilities are not speculative. Organizations are already deploying AI-powered observability that automatically analyzes logs and flags anomalies before they impact production. Scaffolding workflows are becoming increasingly intelligent, generating not just boilerplate code but production-ready configurations tailored to the specific context. Documentation is being synthesized and queried through natural language interfaces rather than searched manually.

The Prerequisites for AI-Powered Platforms

The platform teams who will thrive in this environment are those who have already built strong foundational platforms. AI agents need reliable, well-documented APIs to interact with. They need accurate software catalogs to understand system relationships. They need established Golden Paths that encode organizational best practices. Organizations that have invested in mature Internal Developer Portals have the infrastructure in place to adopt AI capabilities rapidly.

The End of DIY

Platform Engineering is entering its "boring" phase, and this is exactly what success looks like. The fundamental patterns are established, and the technology choices are converging.

The teams achieving the best outcomes have recognized that maintaining commodity infrastructure is not a competitive advantage. They buy or use managed solutions for the interface layer, freeing their platform engineers to focus on the unique Golden Paths and integrations that actually differentiate their developer experience.

Building a developer portal is not the same as building a platform. The portal is the interface; the platform is the substance behind it. Organizations that conflate the two often find themselves with impressive storefronts and empty shelves. The path forward is to source the interface from a specialist and focus your energy on the substance.

Next Steps

If you're ready to move from concept to implementation, here are concrete next steps you can take:

Evaluate Your Build vs. Buy Decision: Before committing significant engineering resources to building and maintaining your own Backstage instance, consider the true cost of self-hosting. Understanding the full scope of ongoing maintenance, upgrades, and support requirements will help you make an informed decision.

Start with a Software Catalog: The foundation of any successful Internal Developer Portal is a comprehensive software catalog. Begin by modeling your existing services, APIs, and resources. Learn about effective strategies for creating a complete catalog to ensure discoverability across your organization.

Implement Self-Service Templates: Reduce friction and standardize best practices by deploying software templates that encode your Golden Paths. This accelerates onboarding and ensures consistency across your engineering organization.

Define Engineering Standards with Tech Insights: Move beyond anecdotal evidence and establish measurable engineering standards using data-driven scorecards. This helps you track compliance, identify gaps, and demonstrate continuous improvement.

Plan Your Adoption Strategy: Technical implementation is only half the battle. Develop a comprehensive adoption strategy that addresses organizational change management, stakeholder engagement, and measuring success metrics that matter to your leadership team.

Explore Managed Backstage Options: If you want to skip the lengthy setup and ongoing maintenance burden, try Roadie to get a production-ready Backstage instance deployed in minutes rather than months, allowing your team to focus on building unique platform capabilities instead of maintaining infrastructure.

Stop building the tool and start building the platform. Get a production-ready Backstage instance today with Roadie.