The whole idea behind platform engineering is the mindset that the "platform", i.e. the stuff that runs the things that business cares about, is a product.
Reframing the platform as a product instead of "IT" or "the place where apps go" introduces three concepts that were previously foreign to operations:
1. The platform has customers instead of consumers, and getting/acting upon their feedback is important,
2. The platform has some semblance of reliability guarantees, and copious observability is needed to uphold them, and
3. Like other products, the platform needs a dedicated, cross-functional team to maintain and improve on it.
So basically platform engineers are engineers that focus on either the "developer experience" part of the platform (i.e. the platform's frontend) or the platforms back-end (servers, persistence, networking, etc.).
> But how does this self-service look like? Do developers fill in a web form to automatically get a server with the right firewall rules?
Kind-of. In an ideal platform, developers wouldn't even know or care that their stuff is on a server. It could be in a toaster, for all they care. So it's kind of just there. They write and maintain code locally, and their build and release pipelines stores and deploys into it.
TIL about platform engineers. But I'm still unsure what kind of things they produce. I know that they basically create a self-service organisation-specific infrastructure that can be used by developers inside an organisation to deploy software. But how does this self-service look like? Do developers fill in a web form to automatically get a server with the right firewall rules?