From tech stack to business value: platform engineering & Kubernetes

Once reserved for deep-infrastructure teams, platform engineering and Kubernetes are now business-critical capabilities as enablers for business. In 2025, they’re shaping everything from developer productivity to cost control and beyond. At Entigo, we’ve seen this shift up close from firefighting infrastructure to designing platform foundations that quietly power real business outcomes.

The shift: why platform engineering has founders and boardroom’s attention

According to Gartner, by 2026, 80% of large software engineering organisations will have established platform teams. But this isn’t just a trend, it's a structural response to mounting complexity, resource constraints, and the need to scale software delivery without scaling chaos. Gartner and other analysts point to several converging pressures behind this shift:

• Developer experience (DevEx) has emerged as a core productivity factor. Platform teams reduce cognitive load by providing paved paths, self-service tooling, and standardised environments.
• Operational efficiency is under renewed scrutiny due to cloud spend, macroeconomic pressure, and tighter investment climates.
• The rise of distributed architectures (microservices, multi-cloud, hybrid) creates fragmented infrastructure landscapes requiring internal alignment through platform abstraction.
• And critically, businesses increasingly recognise that software delivery velocity is a strategic differentiator, not just an engineering concern.

In essence, the growth of platform engineering reflects a move toward treating internal infrastructure as a product that exists to accelerate other teams, reduce rework, and create measurable value. At Entigo, we see this shift reflected even in scaleups and domain-specific tech startups. The reasoning is the same: build once, scale many. Invest early in how you ship - not just what you ship. Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) and Kubernetes offer a simple promise: consistency, speed, and safety at scale. Instead of each team reinventing CI/CD or security posture, platform engineers create reusable “golden paths” that developers can follow with confidence. The result? Faster lead times, fewer production issues, and less time spent on infrastructure, so developers focus on what matters: delivering customer value.

What business leaders should pay attention to

For startups and scaleups, platform engineering isn’t about abstract infrastructure maturity. It’s about two immediate, measurable outcomes:

• Time to market
• Cost of delivery The most innovative product idea means little if you’re bottlenecked by slow and labor-intensive deployments, unreliable environments, or fragmented tooling. In early and growth-stage companies, speed is your moat, and cost discipline is your runway. This is where Kubernetes and platform engineering, done right, become a differentiator.

1. Time to market: the compounding effect of developer speed

In high-growth teams, shipping fast without breaking things is the real competitive edge. But too often, engineers spend hours configuring CI/CD, debugging environments, or waiting on DevOps tickets. A well-designed internal platform gives developers:

• Self-service access to production-grade environments
• Built-in observability, security, and deployment workflows
• One golden path, instead of ten fragile ones

At Entigo, we helped one SaaS client standardise on Kubernetes with a GitOps-based platform that took less than a week to roll out. The impact? Their teams went from manual deploys to fully automated pipelines in under two sprints. They shipped new features 42% faster - not by hiring more engineers, but by removing friction. Faster shipping isn't just developer convenience. It’s faster revenue testing, quicker customer feedback, and a tighter feedback loop between product and market.

2. Cost efficiency: control, transparency, and margin protection

For many scaleups, cloud costs are a creeping threat. Kubernetes doesn’t automatically save money, but platform engineering enables you to run it wisely:

• Autoscaling and resource quotas ensure you don’t overprovision
• Multi-tenant architecture prevents duplicate infra per team or service
• FinOps tooling and tagging give visibility into where money goes

In one case, an Entigo's client reduced their infrastructure spend by 28% in a single quarter after platformising their workloads across clouds. The key wasn't heroic optimisation, it was standardisation. Without a platform, every team builds their own pipeline, picks their own logging stack, runs their own dev clusters. It’s chaotic, and it’s expensive. What platform engineering offers is leverage: one system of delivery that scales with your company, without scaling your costs linearly.

Why this matters for founders, CTOs, and product owners

In the Nordic tech ecosystem, where engineering quality, product thinking, and operational efficiency are deeply valued, platform engineering speaks directly to the strengths of the region. Kubernetes is no longer a cutting-edge experiment, it's the underlying standard. But the question facing founders and product leaders isn’t whether to use it. The real question is: Can we scale fast, sustainably, and securely - without burning through capital or talent? That’s where platform engineering creates business leverage. Not just in abstract technical performance, but in how you turn developer time into customer value. For early- and growth-stage companies, the business case is both strategic and immediate:

• Accelerate time to revenue Shorter lead times mean quicker validation, faster feedback loops, and speed to product-market fit. Platform-driven teams ship predictably, without waiting on tickets or navigating tool chaos.

• Build sustainable margins from day one Cloud costs spiral quickly when infrastructure grows ad hoc. Scaleups often compete in low-friction global markets, meaning efficiency and predictability are core to maintaining pricing power.

• De-risk team scale-up Nordic companies scale with lean, high-talent teams. Platform engineering ensures those teams can grow without multiplying inefficiencies. Onboarding becomes faster, standards more consistent, and delivery more resilient.

• Lay a resilient foundation for global growth From GDPR and data sovereignty to hybrid cloud and green computing, Nordic tech firms often lead with values. Platform engineering enables you to meet these demands structurally, not patch them in later.

In Entigo’s experience working with teams of all sizes, the pattern is consistent: companies that treat platform engineering as a product function outperform those that treat it as a background task. The difference isn’t Kubernetes itself. It’s how opinionated, repeatable, and efficient your delivery model is and how well it aligns with your business priorities. Platform engineering is no longer a niche technical concern. It’s a strategic discipline that governs your ability to execute, compete, and scale.

Miros.ai scales AI innovation without infrastructure overhead

Miros.ai, a Nordic AI startup, is building an entirely new way to search, a wordless, gesture-based product discovery experience for e-commerce. Their innovation lies in removing the need for typing or keywords altogether, allowing users to explore intuitively across complex digital product catalogues. As the product matured and the technology stack expanded, Miros.ai faced a common challenge: how to deliver at high speed while keeping infrastructure lean, reliable and maintainable. Partnering with Entigo, they implemented a streamlined Kubernetes-based platform tailored to their growth stage. With the internal platform in place, Miros.ai was able to:

• Accelerate iteration speed on AI-driven features
• Deploy confidently across environments, without bottlenecks
• Keep their engineering team focused on product and machine learning, not infrastructure upkeep

For a team pushing the boundaries of user experience, platform stability and delivery velocity became essential enablers not distractions. Their case shows how startups building technically ambitious products can stay fast, focused, and operationally efficient with the right platform foundations.

Avoiding the pitfalls: why DIY platform efforts often fail

Many startups fall into a well meaning trap: “We’ll build our own platform, how hard can it be?” The answer? Hard enough to slow you down and burn through budget. Internal platforms often start with best intentions, but quickly morph into:

• Spaghetti Terraform repos no one owns
• CI/CD pipelines that work “only if you know the quirks”
• Knowledge silos tied to a few overworked DevOps leads
• Fragile environments that don’t scale beyond one team This is where early growth companies lose velocity as well the need to deal with the platform becomes the excuse for not delivering customer value. Developers get stuck on tooling instead of features. Every delivery is slower than the last and so on!? We’ve seen it too often: brilliant product ideas undercut by unstable, inconsistent infrastructure. Worse, the company becomes dependent on internal experts who can’t take holidays and who eventually burn out or leave. What we’ve learned at Entigo is this: the winning teams build platforms as products, not projects. That means:
• Clear ownership (usually a lean platform team)
• Reusable modules (not snowflake solutions)
• Measurable impact (backed by data) Even a modest platform investment pays off quickly. In fact, most Entigo clients see positive ROI within the first quarter, especially if they’re transitioning from chaotic or ticket-based deployment workflows.

Platform engineering is business discipline in disguise

Platform engineering and Kubernetes aren’t about infrastructure anymore. They’re about how fast your company can learn, ship, and scale without falling apart.

For startups and scaleups, the business case is straightforward:

• Time-to-market is your lifeline.
• Cloud cost is your margin.
• Talent productivity is your growth engine.

If your internal delivery is inconsistent, ticket-based, or expensive to maintain, you're not just burning time, but you’re burning opportunity. The right platform strategy buys you speed, leverage, and resilience.

At Entigo, we believe platform engineering is one of the highest-ROI investments a growing tech company can make. But only if it’s built with business outcomes in mind.

Don’t reinvent infrastructure. Reinvent your delivery velocity.