What guides your approach to software development? In our roles at Google, we’re constantly working to build better software, faster. Within Google, our Developer Platform team and Google Cloud have a strategic partnership and a shared strategy: together, we take our internal capabilities and engineering tools and package them up for Google Cloud customers.
At the heart of this is understanding the many ways that software teams, big and small, need to balance efficiency, quality, and cost, all while delivering value. In our recent talk at PlatformCon 2025, we shared key parts of our platform strategy, which we call “shift down.”
Shift down is an approach that advocates for embedding decisions and responsibilities into underlying internal developer platforms (IDPs), thereby reducing the operational burden on developers. This contrasts with the DevOps trend of “shift left,” which pushes more effort earlier into the development cycle, a method that is proving difficult at scale due to the sheer volume and rate of change in requirements. Our shift down strategy helps us maximize value with existing resources so businesses can achieve high innovation velocity with acceptable quality, acceptable risk, and sustainable costs across a diverse range of business models. In the talk, we share learnings that have been really helpful to us in our software and platform engineering journey:
Source Credit: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/application-modernization/a-guide-to-platform-engineering/
