Introduction
Platform Engineering (PE) is rapidly becoming the cornerstone of modern software delivery. As Gartner predicts, “By 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams as internal providers of reusable services, components and tools for application delivery.” This shift is not just about tooling—it's about transforming how organizations deliver value at scale.
At the heart of this transformation lies the concept of templated environments—predefined, reusable, and governed templates that encapsulate infrastructure, security, delivery pipelines, and operational best practices. These templates are the building blocks of a new era in software engineering—one where speed, consistency, and developer empowerment are no longer trade-offs, but coexisting outcomes.
Why Templated Environments Matter
Templated environments are more than just Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC). They represent a strategic approach to accelerate the delivery of applications and the speed at which they produce business value. By codifying best practices, governance, and automation into reusable assets, platform teams can eliminate repetitive setup tasks, reduce risk, and empower developers to focus on innovation.
This approach aligns with the core principles of platform engineering:
- Improved Developer Experience: Developers gain access to self-service capabilities that provision environments, pipelines, and services on demand—without waiting on infrastructure teams.
- Frictionless Enablement: Good platform engineering makes it easy to do the right things and hard to do the wrong things. Templates enforce standards, security, and compliance by design.
- Scalability and Governance: Templates are versioned, traceable, and centrally managed, enabling organizations to scale their engineering efforts without sacrificing control.
The Shift from Ad Hoc to Productized Infrastructure
Historically, infrastructure provisioning was a manual, error-prone process. Even with IaC, inconsistencies and governance gaps persisted. Templated environments change that by introducing product thinking into infrastructure:
- Templates are treated as internal products, complete with versioning, documentation, and support.
- They are discoverable via developer portals and deployable via GitHub Enterprise Cloud or Azure DevOps.
- They include not just code, but reference architectures, governance policies, CI/CD pipelines, and modernization backlogs.
This shift enables platform teams to operate like product teams—delivering value to internal customers (developers and ops teams) with the same rigor and agility as external-facing software products.
Real-World Impact
Many organizations have already embraced templated environments to modernize thousands of applications on Azure. Their success stories highlight the tangible benefits:
- Faster Time to Market: Developers can spin up compliant environments in minutes.
- Reduced Operational Overhead: Ops teams manage fewer tickets and focus on higher-value work.
- Improved Compliance: Templates embed security and policy controls from the start.
What’s Next
In the next part of this series, we’ll explore the anatomy of a platform engineering template—what it includes, how it’s structured, and how it supports scenarios like greenfield development, migration, and operations-driven deployments.
Platfrom Engneering Part 2: Anatomy of a Platform Engineering Template
