Platform engineers make sense of external applications and infrastructure and synthesize that into an internal platform. There are significant upsides to optimizing horizontal software and hardware for a company-specific use case.

However, there is a tendency to create a system so customizable that it becomes a thin abstraction over the underlying platform. This is the inner-platform effect.

This may maybe most common with internal deployment platforms. There are so many choices to make. Container or function? What kinds of base images? How to configure environment variables?