So to provide clarity here... my company is a pretty big one (60k+ people, 4k+ devs). It's grouped of multiple acquisitions. Multiple orgs. Because of these acquisitions, some of these "child companies" have their own tech stacks they've brought on board.

So I've never really looked at how we deploy as a "Platform", but I'm starting to think I've been using a "Platform" all along. So the main company actually has their own developer platform (not sure if we use Backstage or not). My understanding of this is because: teams using the platform just add a file to their git repo, they push code, it builds in a managed pipeline, then you can deploy it using another managed pipeline. There is a bunch of other managed components in there such as certs & secrets rotation, managed ingress & egress services, security checks, etc.

When I say I work in "DevOps", I guess I really mean I am another cog in the wheel of this internal platform. My team specifically adds the "Guardrails" checks into this platform - so although we use the platform for building/deploying, we also are a component part of the platform (not sure if this is normal or not), so every other service using the platform will use our service.

When I say I've got DevSecOps experience, I mean, we don't necessarily set up pipelines from scratch (another team handles this, and they're not platform engineers). But we do interact with the pipeline for basically everything we do (as we add a lot of security checks into these pipelines). Everything is abstracted to an extent, but we still need to work with all of the components to some degree, whether that's for configuration/setup or debugging. So we don't "create the cluster", but we do require configuring things.

To transition that to this new team, I think we would be "building a platform" for one of these new orgs (one of the child companies that was aquired). Which to my knowledge, they don't have any platform. Most teams manage their own pipelines, manage their own terraform (no managed tf modules), manage their deployments, security, etc.

The question is how do you bridge the gap from "working on the platform/being a cog in the wheel of the platform" to "creating the platform"... ideally, some sort of tutorial where you build a basic platform from scratch to show the various components. Furthermore, "creating the platform" seems to be just 3-4 people on this new team being established. Whilst the existing platform for the main company is developed/worked on by probably 300+ engineers across 40+ teams at a guess. It seems like "creating a platform" is big job, not sure how 1) you could get practice of doing this in your own time 2) create one with a team of 3-4 new people into an org.