In many enterprises, ad-hoc production changes have become a chronic pain point, with teams independently crafting bespoke scripts, elevated-privilege hacks, and one-off workflows to address urgent business and technical needs. These range from reversing transactions via a maker-checker process to archiving data in bulk for compliance and ad-hoc database tweaks to support production operations.

This fragmentation leads to security risks, audit blind spots, duplicated effort, and a steep learning curve for new engineers. Rather than letting each team reinvent the wheel, platform engineering offers a path to consolidate these patterns into a cohesive, self-service capability that scales across the organization.