Developers are losing days every month to infrastructure bottlenecks, compliance hurdles, and inconsistent environments. Platform engineering promised to fix that, yet too many platforms fail before they deliver real impact.
In this comparison of Backstage vs Pulumi IDP, we’ll explore why choosing the right architectural approach matters more than the tool itself.
In previous articles in this series, we’ve explored how platform engineering transforms infrastructure chaos into consistent provisioning, empowers engineering teams through self-service infrastructure, optimizes workflows, embeds security directly into your platform, and provides observability as a superpower. Each pillar builds upon the previous ones, creating a cohesive foundation that accelerates innovation and productivity.
But as your platform scales, new challenges inevitably emerge. You’ve empowered engineering teams with self-service infrastructure, streamlined workflows, and embedded security directly into your platform. But as your platform scales, new challenges emerge: How do you ensure consistency, compliance, and cost control without slowing your teams down?
Engineering teams drown in observability tool sprawl, alert fatigue, and reactive debugging that turns 3AM incidents into hours-long fire drills. Learn how embedding observability into your platform with centralized service dashboards, actionable alerts, and built-in instrumentation transforms reactive firefighting into proactive innovation, enabling teams to resolve major incidents in minutes instead of hours.
SEITENBAU GmbH faced a unique challenge - building a platform for 20+ independent projects, each with different tech stacks, deployment targets, and operational models. Instead of forcing standardization, they built an infrastructure buffet using Pulumi.
Platform engineering has emerged as a hot area, but is it truly an evolutionary step toward a greater way of developing and operating software? Or is it merely a fad and a rebranding of existing ideas?
In previous articles, we looked at how platform engineering fixes infrastructure chaos, enables self-service, and improves developer workflows. These pillars work together to boost both developer productivity and organizational speed.
But there’s still one critical element that can make or break all this progress: security.
Traditional security efforts — even “shift-left” initiatives — often create friction instead of clearing the way for innovation. Embedding security directly into your platform changes that. By weaving in policy-as-code, centralized secrets management, and identity-based authentication, you turn security from a blocker into an enabler. And with the right metrics, you can measure how well your platform balances protection and speed.
Pulumi Cloud empowers engineers to automate, secure, and manage modern infrastructure platforms.
Many companies are building internal developer platforms or modern infrastructure platforms to provide developer self-service while maintaining security and compliance. Companies adopt Pulumi IaC so they can apply software engineering practices to their infrastructure scaling problems and because it is fully open source with a strong community and public roadmap.
In the last article in this Platform Engineering Pillars series, we explored how self-service infrastructure frees developers from bottlenecks and dependency gates. By providing reusable infrastructure modules and intent-based configurations, platform teams dramatically reduce infrastructure friction. This self-service model powers faster deployments, increased autonomy, and fewer delays.
However, infrastructure provisioning alone isn’t enough to improve developer experience. Even with efficient provisioning, developers can still face inconsistent local setups, sluggish CI/CD pipelines, poor documentation, and fragmented tooling. These obstacles quietly reduce developer productivity, slow developer velocity, and increase operational overhead.
Previous articles in this series explored platform engineering principles and how Infrastructure as Code creates a solid foundation. But there’s still an important challenge to address: the infrastructure provisioning process itself. Without proper modularity and a clear separation between intent and infrastructure details, things get messy—leading to friction, delays, and unnecessary complexity.
Provisioning is the first pillar of platform engineering. Without consistent infrastructure provisioning – the automated creation and management of the underlying cloud resources – the rest of the platform suffers. Self-service, governance, and streamlined developer workflows all depend on it. Ultimately, a self-service layer on top of your cloud infrastructure is the goal, enabling developers to quickly and safely provision the resources they need, while adhering to organizational best practices and policies. But before self-service, the foundation of a good IDP is a robust and reliable provisioning system.
By defining cloud resources as code and automating deployments, platform engineering teams ensure every environment – development, staging, and production – stays consistent and maintainable. This cuts down on configuration drift, reduces manual work, and supports auditable, collaborative workflows for every change.
Let’s explore how platform engineering teams can achieve this by version-controlling infrastructure, automating deployments, separating environments properly, and limiting console interventions. By applying these principles, teams can create a platform where developers can move fast without breaking things, and where infrastructure supports innovation rather than slowing it down.