Spotify's development team had been using DevOps, the most widely adapted software development process of the time (particularly for cloud native technolgies), and noticed that new problems emerged. Developer productivity was challenged by the continuously increasing complexity of their DevOps processes, which created high cognitive load and frictional losses from context switching. To solve this problem, they developed an internal platform to allow their developers to work more productively. They saw this platform as needed to create a "Golden Path" of software delivery. The Golden Path represents the optimum path that development teams can take, from product concept to delivery, of all possible paths. Spotify also recognized this internal development platform represented a core function that solved critical problems not just for their organization, but for organizations at large. So they released the infrastructure they developed as a product called Backstage, which helped solidify platform engineering as a concept.
Backstage was released as a generalized solution to the specific problems they faced in the development and maintenance of their core software products. Spotify's development team had the clarity to understand the need for the Golden Path as a concept for their company, and recognized that while the specifics of what a Golden Path are will be different for every company, there was enough overlap in Golden Paths to justify a generalized infrastructure. Platform engineering identiifies a common need for self-service, orchestration, and organization, focused on developer productivity, where the developer is the end customer/user. Platform engineering itself is the practice of using dedicated teams to create custom internal development platforms ("IDPs") to maximize developer productivity. According to Gartner, platform engineering is "an emerging technology approach that can accelerate the delivery of applications and the pace at which they produce business value. Platform engineering improves developer experience and productivity by providing self-service capabilities with automated infrastructure operations. Platform engineering is trending because of its promise to optimize the developer experience and accelerate product teams’ delivery of customer value."
Virtuoso shares strong common roots with the platform engineering evolutionary tree, with a clear focus on the importance of the Golden Path. We use the concept of differentiation to add some richness to robust understandings of the Golden Path.