Central Platform Team Versus Embedded Platform Engineers
TradeoffStaffPrincipalUpdated
Thirty product teams each maintain their own continuous integration (CI) pipelines, Terraform modules, and Kubernetes manifests, and you have budget for six platform engineers. A base image upgrade takes a full quarter because every team does it separately.
Short answer: Central Platform Team. A central team should own one shared set of pipelines, modules, and base images, because the waste here is thirty copies of the same work.
The Two Options
A
Central Platform Team
B
Embedded Platform Engineers
Drill This: Your Pick First
The Better Pick
Option A
Central Platform Team
A central team should own one shared set of pipelines, modules, and base images, because the waste here is thirty copies of the same work. Spread across thirty teams, six engineers become part-time helpers who each patch a local fork, and the duplication stays. A central team ships the upgrade once and turns adoption into a version bump.
When the Other One Wins
Embedded Platform Engineers
When teams' infrastructure needs genuinely diverge, such as a machine learning team running GPU fleets beside web teams, embedding specialists where the unique work lives pays off more than a shared layer.