In today’s fast-changing digital economy, organizations are under constant pressure to deliver faster, more secure, and more reliable applications. For many, the challenge isn’t just adopting cloud technologies—it’s about building platforms that empower developers, ensuring governance and compliance, and modernizing legacy applications without disrupting the business.
This is where platform engineering and application modernization come together.
Why Platform Engineering Matters
Platform engineering is about building internal platforms that abstract the complexity of infrastructure and DevOps tooling. Instead of developers wrestling with container orchestration, CI/CD pipelines, or observability stacks, they can focus on building business features.
Key characteristics include:
- Self-service: Developers get what they need without waiting on infrastructure teams.
- Consistency: Environments are standardized across dev, test, and production.
- Scalability: The platform grows with the business, not against it.
The Push for Application Modernization
Legacy systems are slowing organizations down. They’re costly to maintain, rigid, and often stand in the way of digital transformation. Modern applications, on the other hand, are cloud-native, API-driven, and microservices-oriented.
Modernization isn’t about replacing everything at once. It’s a journey that can involve:
- Rehosting (lift and shift)
- Replatforming (optimizing for new environments)
- Refactoring (redesigning for microservices and modern practices)
The goal is agility—getting products to market faster, meeting compliance requirements, and reducing costs over time.
The Customer Pain Points We See
- Legacy infrastructure and vendor lock-in
- Shortage of DevOps and cloud-native skills
- Complex regulatory compliance needs
- Rising infrastructure costs
- Poor or inconsistent developer experience
These challenges often create hesitation, but with the right approach they can be turned into opportunities.
Building the Layers of a Modern Platform
A robust platform engineering approach typically spans five layers:
- Infrastructure Foundation – resilient compute, storage, and networking.
- Containerization & Orchestration – Kubernetes as the engine, with flexibility for scaling.
- Developer Experience & CI/CD – self-service pipelines, GitOps, and automation.
- Security & Governance – container security, compliance scanning, and policy enforcement.
- Observability & DR – metrics, logging, tracing, and disaster recovery capabilities.
Each layer builds confidence, speeds delivery, and reduces operational risk.
Moving from Monolith to Microservices
Breaking down monolithic applications into microservices is at the heart of modernization. It enables teams to deliver smaller, independent features faster. With a service mesh and proper observability, organizations can manage communication, scale efficiently, and maintain reliability.
The DevOps Culture Shift
Technology alone isn’t enough. Modernization requires a DevOps culture where development and operations teams collaborate closely. Practices such as shift-left security, continuous testing, and GitOps make it possible to deliver more reliable software at speed.
Why This Matters Now
Across industries, we’re seeing organizations—especially those in regulated sectors—take a hard look at their IT strategies. Many must remain on-premises for compliance, yet they want the speed and agility of the cloud. Others are bringing workloads back on-premises to manage cost and sovereignty.
This convergence creates a moment where platform engineering and application modernization are no longer optional—they’re strategic imperatives.
A Journey, Not a Project
Platform engineering and application modernization aren’t one-time projects. They’re journeys that involve discovery, foundation building, container adoption, modernization of apps, and continuous optimization.
With the right approach, organizations can create environments that are developer-friendly, secure, and resilient, while positioning themselves to thrive in a digital-first world.
Takeaway: The winners in the next wave of digital transformation will be those who master platform engineering while modernizing their applications—delivering the speed of cloud with the control of on-premises, all while staying compliant and cost-effective.
This article draws on a discussion with Prasanna De Mel, who contributed valuable input.