Platform Engineering

Design and operate the internal platforms your engineering teams build on — so developers spend time shipping product, not fighting infrastructure.

40%

faster deployments

60%

fewer production incidents

3×

faster developer onboarding

100%

IaC-managed infrastructure

Overview

What is Platform Engineering?

Platform engineering turns your infrastructure into a product — one that developers choose to use because it makes them faster, not one they're forced to use because it's the only option. We design and build Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) that standardise the path to production, expose service health, and reduce cognitive load across every engineering team.

At ICF we've built platforms from scratch and modernised legacy setups at organisations ranging from fast-growth startups to global engineering teams with 200+ engineers. Every engagement starts with understanding your developers' pain points, not a list of technologies.

Capabilities

What We Deliver

Kubernetes — AWS EKS & GKE

Cluster design for multi-tenant workloads with namespace isolation
Node pool sizing, spot instance strategies, and cluster autoscaling
Network policies, RBAC, and pod security standards
Managed upgrade cadences with zero-downtime rollouts
Cost visibility with Kubecost or OpenCost integration

Internal Developer Portals with Backstage

Software catalog: services, APIs, libraries, pipelines in one place
Tech radar for communicating technology standards
Scaffolded service templates — new service to first deployment in minutes
Custom Backstage plugins for internal tooling integration
Inner-source discovery and documentation integration

Infrastructure as Code & GitOps

Custom Terraform providers (open-source contributor)
Reusable Terraform module libraries with semantic versioning
Atlantis for pull-request-driven Terraform plan and apply
ArgoCD app-of-apps pattern for multi-cluster GitOps
Secrets management with HashiCorp Vault and External Secrets Operator

Observability & DORA Metrics

Prometheus + Grafana stack deployment and configuration
DORA metrics dashboards: deployment frequency, lead time, MTTR, change failure rate
Alertmanager rules with PagerDuty and Slack integration
Distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry and Jaeger
SLO and error budget dashboards per service

How We Work

Our Approach

Discovery

Developer interviews, workflow mapping, and infrastructure audit to identify the highest-friction pain points.

Platform Design

Architecture decision records, technology selection, and a phased roadmap aligned to your team's capacity.

Build & Iterate

Two-week sprints delivering working platform increments. Developer feedback loops built in from the start.

Enable & Handoff

Pair programming, runbooks, and workshops so your team owns the platform long after the engagement ends.

Technology

Stack & Tools

Kubernetes AWS EKS Google GKE Backstage Terraform ArgoCD Helm Prometheus Grafana Alertmanager HashiCorp Vault External Secrets Operator Crossplane OpenTelemetry Atlantis Golang

When to Engage

Is This Right for You?

Your engineers manage Kubernetes instead of shipping product

When platform ops is a full-time job for product engineers, it's time for a dedicated platform layer with self-service abstractions.

New service setup takes days, not minutes

Backstage templates and standardised scaffolding cut a new service's path to production from two weeks to under two hours.

You have 3+ teams deploying independently with different tooling

Platform engineering creates a golden path that standardises without mandating — teams move faster, security posture improves.

You have no visibility into deployment frequency or MTTR

DORA dashboards built on your existing CI/CD data give leadership the metrics to make investment decisions with confidence.

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Ready to build your developer platform?

Tell us about your engineering org size, current Kubernetes setup, and biggest pain points. We'll respond within one business day.

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