The fix to platform team understaffing isn't hiring more — it's building on infrastructure where monitoring, security, and upgrades come built in.
You probably already know the shape of the problem. One engineer carrying three clusters. An on-call rotation that's one person deep. A security patch backlog that never quite makes it to the top of the sprint. A growing list of internal developer requests that keeps compounding regardless of how many tickets get closed.
This isn't a hiring failure. It's a structural one. And the instinct to fix it by opening another requisition is exactly the wrong move.
The Demand for Internal Platforms Is Outpacing the Teams Available to Build Them
Platform engineering adoption has moved fast. According to Gartner, 45% of large software engineering organizations had dedicated platform teams in 2022. By 2025, Google surveys put adoption above 55%. Gartner expects that number to reach 80% by end of 2026. That's not incremental growth — that's a discipline crossing from emerging practice to default way of working in under five years.
But adoption curves don't come with automatic staffing budgets. Over 55% of platform teams are less than two years old, with nearly half of respondents citing the need to reduce reliance on repetitive tasks through better automation as their primary driver. These teams are standing up infrastructure, managing internal customers, maintaining golden paths, and absorbing developer escalations — simultaneously, and usually with the same headcount they started with.
The Platform Engineering track at KubeCon addressed exactly this tension: building and customizing cloud native platforms, automating infrastructure operations, and enhancing self-service workflows for developers. The demand for internal platforms is outpacing the teams available to build them.
At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026, one conversation stuck with us. A platform lead from a mid-size European fintech: two engineers, thirty-something clusters, a growing internal customer base, and no obvious path to relief. That story wasn't unique.
The Reflex Answer — Hire More — Doesn't Hold
The instinct to solve an understaffing problem by hiring is understandable. It's also expensive and slow, and it doesn't address why the team is stretched in the first place.
According to the State of Platform Engineering 2024 report, platform engineers in North America earn an average of $219,078 — roughly 43% more than the DevOps engineer average of $153,639. That's before you factor in time-to-hire, onboarding, and the risk that a new engineer walks into the same overloaded system that burned out the last person.
More critically: the issue isn't how many engineers you have. It's how much of their time gets consumed by work that a better platform would eliminate entirely.
According to surveys, 75% of developers lose between 6 and 15 hours every week navigating an average of 7.4 disconnected tools — according to Port's State of Internal Developer Portals survey of 300 engineering teams across the U.S. and Western Europe. CIOs who invest in seamless workflows instead of just tooling gain faster time to market and retain top talent. That number doesn't shrink by adding another engineer to the pile. It shrinks when the pile itself gets smaller — when monitoring, security, and upgrades stop being recurring line items on the platform team's sprint.
More tools don't mean more productivity. CIOs are shifting focus from tool volume to developer efficiency. Among the new trends in platform engineering, the metric is flow — not headcount and tools.
The organizations that are operating comfortably aren't running larger platform teams. They're running smarter ones on more capable infrastructure.
What High-Maturity Organizations Do Differently
The gap between a team that's always catching up and one that's running efficiently isn't headcount. It's platform maturity.
High-maturity platform teams report 40–50% reductions in cognitive load for developers, freeing them to focus on business value. DORA's 2025 research confirms that platform quality is the defining differentiator — 90% of organizations now have internal platforms, but it's the quality of those platforms, not just their existence, that separates elite performers from everyone else. Those aren't the outcomes of a bigger team — they're the outcomes of a platform doing more of the work automatically.
The underlying principle is what's known as "shift down." Shift down is an approach that advocates for embedding decisions and responsibilities into underlying internal developer platforms, reducing the operational burden on developers. This contrasts with the DevOps trend of "shift left," which pushes more effort earlier into the development cycle — a method that is proving difficult at scale.
Engineering leaders want standards without slowing innovation. They want reliability and security built in, not enforced through manual processes or tribal knowledge. These are not tooling problems. They are structural ones.
When monitoring, security, and upgrade automation come built in rather than bolted on, platform teams stop fighting fires and start building forward. That's the maturity gap. And it's not closed by headcount.
What "Built In" Actually Means at the Infrastructure Layer
"Built-in monitoring, security, and upgrades" can sound like a product pitch. It's worth being precise about what it means operationally — and why it matters most at the infrastructure layer.
Monitoring That's Automatic, Not Optional
The critical requirement for any mature platform is that it automatically instruments new services — developers should never configure monitoring manually. When observability is opt-in, it gets skipped under deadline pressure. When it's part of the platform baseline, it's always there. IDPs now come with built-in dashboards, logs, and alerting so teams can monitor performance in real time, leading to better and faster decisions.
Security That's Enforced, Not Requested
A significant number of organizations report experiencing data breaches tied to cloud-native applications, and some identify APIs as the most susceptible element of the application stack — underscoring that misconfiguration, not missing tools, is the dominant source of risk.
The answer isn't adding more security tools for developers to learn. By 2026, platform engineering teams will increasingly emerge as the central owners of security capabilities, embedding hardened defaults, identity-by-default access models, and shared enforcement mechanisms directly into the developer platform — reducing misconfiguration risk, improving developer productivity, and creating a more consistent security posture.
The "shift left" era ends as platform engineering matures. Platforms will fundamentally change how compliance is enforced, injecting robust controls directly at the infrastructure layer. This makes non-compliant deployments not merely discouraged but technologically impossible. Policy-as-Code, comprehensive service templates, and the automatic injection of essential security controls are becoming baseline requirements.
Upgrades That Don't Require a War Room
Without an upgrade-aware platform, every new version requires a documented runbook, a maintenance window, a rollback plan, and weeks of planning overhead. Multiply that across a growing cluster footprint and a small team becomes a full-time upgrade shop. The InfoQ Cloud and DevOps Trends Report 2025 put it plainly: the fragmentation of tools and responsibilities has led to cognitive overload and diminishing returns across engineering organizations. Every hour a senior engineer spends debugging a Helm chart is an hour not spent delivering business value.
The teams with the most operational capacity aren't the ones with the most engineers. They're the ones who built upgrade automation once and stopped treating every release cycle as a crisis.
The Infrastructure Decision Underneath All of This
If you're operating on infrastructure that requires your platform team to manually configure observability, hand-enforce security policies, and plan every upgrade from scratch, the problem isn't your team size. It's your operational baseline.
When monitoring, security scanning, upgrades, and compliance reporting come built in rather than bolted on, platform teams can focus on what they're building instead of what's keeping them up at night.
This is exactly the thinking behind Navos — production Kubernetes with built-in monitoring, security scanning, and expert-backed upgrades. 100% upstream Kubernetes and Cluster API. No fork, no lock-in. Your manifests, your Helm charts, your clusters — but without the operational toil that eats platform team capacity. Deploy on any cloud or on-premise infrastructure, run it yourself with our guidance, or let us operate it entirely.
For organizations running OpenStack workloads, Atmosphere follows the same logic. Atmosphere is an advanced deployment and management layer that runs OpenStack on Kubernetes, offering simple upgrades, native monitoring, and automation — with full lifecycle management across all cloud operations. It's the platform that lets your team stop managing the platform and start building on top of it.
In both cases, the goal is the same: free your platform engineers to do platform engineering instead of infrastructure firefighting.
The Teams That Get There First Will Set the Standard
As organizations grow, the choice is rarely between platform engineering and no platform engineering. It is between intentional design and accidental complexity. Platform engineering emerges when organizations recognize that scaling through effort does not work indefinitely.
Your platform team isn't underperforming. They're under-supported. More specifically, they're probably operating on infrastructure that was built to be managed, not to manage itself.
The organizations that close the gap won't necessarily have the biggest teams. They'll have the right foundation under those teams — one where the hard operational work is handled at the platform layer, and engineers spend their time on problems that require engineering judgment.
If your team is stretched and you're trying to figure out what that looks like in practice, talk to us. We've had this conversation with a lot of platform leads. It's usually a productive one.
