Platform Orchestration:
What It Is & How It Works
Written by Daniel Bryant. Last Updated: 15 July 2026
What is Platform Orchestration?
A platform orchestrator is a crucial layer in platform engineering, focusing on managing and optimising platform components, infrastructure, and application workflows.
Platform orchestration bridge the gap between infrastructure automation and developer experience by seamlessly coordinating services, policies, and business processes across multiple environments.
According to Daniel Bryant's blog, "Platform Engineering: Orchestrating Applications, Platforms, and Infrastructure", unlike infrastructure orchestration or infrastructure composition, which handles lower-level resources related to compute (and storage, networking, etc.), platform orchestration is about reducing complexity and improving the lifecycle management of platform components for developers.
Why Use Platform Orchestrators?
Platform orchestrators provide developers with an efficient, self-service interface for accessing resources, automating infrastructure, and deploying applications. This makes it easier for teams to focus on delivering customer value while reducing cognitive load.
A well-implemented platform orchestrator enables organisations to consistently manage and scale their digital platform, ensuring services and infrastructure are reliable, compliant, and capable of supporting growth.
Orchestrating platforms allow teams to manage a wide array of services and infrastructure from a single source of truth, helping to minimise technical sprawl. It ensures that policies, workflows, and resources are applied consistently across environments.
How to Implement Platform Orchestration?
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Start with Clear Goals: Define the goals for your platform orchestrator—whether it’s reducing manual processes, automating infrastructure, or optimising the developer experience. Key outcomes should include faster delivery, reduced risk, and increased efficiency.
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Leverage Platform Engineering Layers: Platform orchestration focuses on the middle layer between infrastructure and applications. By understanding the interaction between these layers, organisations can apply the right tooling and patterns for effective orchestration.
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Use Best Practices and Tools: Select and integrate the appropriate tools for your orchestrator. Technologies like Backstage, Terraform, and Kratix can help manage the lifecycle of applications and platforms efficiently. Make sure these tools reduce the cognitive load for developers rather than adding complexity.
Platform Orchestration FAQ
What is a platform orchestrator?
A platform orchestrator is the layer that manages the lifecycle of your platform's components, policies, and workflows, sitting between your application layer and your infrastructure layer. Rather than just calling infrastructure APIs (like a portal) or provisioning raw infrastructure (like an IaC tool), it codifies your organisation's business processes so platform teams can consistently design, roll out, and evolve platform services.
What is platform orchestration?
Platform orchestration is the practice of coordinating platform components, policies, and workflows so they're applied consistently across environments. It's one of three essential layers in modern platform engineering, alongside application choreography (how developers code, ship, and run) and infrastructure orchestration/composition (how infrastructure is planned, built, and maintained), and its job is to reduce technical sprawl and cognitive load for both developers and platform teams.
Why do organisations need a platform orchestration layer at all?
Because the application and infrastructure layers get most of the attention, but the "middle" — managing the platform's own lifecycle — is often left undone. Teams end up with a portal that looks good on day one but can't handle day-two operations, or an infrastructure-as-code setup that quietly pushes complexity back onto developers. Platform orchestration exists to close that gap.
Isn't a developer portal like Backstage already my platform?
Not on its own. A portal is typically a front end that calls a set of infrastructure APIs. It's great for day-one self-service, but it usually offers limited support for day-two concerns such as updating workflows, enforcing policy changes, or managing the ongoing lifecycle of what's been provisioned. Without an underlying orchestration layer, a portal is a facade rather than a platform.
Isn't Terraform (or another IaC tool) enough to orchestrate my platform?
IaC tools are excellent at orchestrating infrastructure, but that's a different layer. In practice, infrastructure abstractions (HCL, Kubernetes YAML, etc.) tend to leak through to developers, adding cognitive load rather than removing it. As organisations add more tools over time, each with its own leaky abstraction, developers end up needing to understand infrastructure details when they really just want to code, ship, and run.
What's the difference between platform orchestration and infrastructure orchestration?
Infrastructure orchestration (or composition) is about planning, building, and maintaining infrastructure resources, such as compute, storage, and networking across environments. Platform orchestration sits a level above that: it's about managing the platform components, policies, and workflows built on top of that infrastructure, so platform teams can evolve the platform without every change rippling back down to raw infrastructure config.
What's the difference between platform orchestration and application choreography?
Application choreography is the developer-facing layer, the UI, CLI, or self-service experience developers use to deploy applications, request resources, and view metrics. Platform orchestration is what makes that self-service experience actually work reliably behind the scenes by managing the platform components and policies the application layer depends on.
What are the goals of a well-orchestrated platform?
Three things: help teams go faster by offering "everything as a service" for rapid, sustainable delivery; decrease risk by automating manual processes into reusable, consistent components; and increase efficiency by letting you manage and scale your platform and resources as a fleet rather than one-off configurations.
Should we build, buy, or borrow a platform orchestrator?
It depends on your team's starting point and existing tooling, but most organisations are less unique than they think. The real requirement is a way to codify your specific business processes, policies, and workflows into the platform, rather than reinventing orchestration from scratch. Stacks like OAM, CNOE, or the "BACK stack" (Backstage, Argo, Crossplane, Kyverno) show how the industry is converging on this problem, though most remain either application-focused or infrastructure-focused rather than addressing the full "missing middle."
How does Kratix fit in as a platform orchestrator?
Kratix is Syntasso's platform orchestration framework, built specifically to fill that missing middle layer, helping teams design composable internal developer platforms, apply policies and workflows consistently, and manage the platform lifecycle without adding cognitive load for developers or platform engineers.
Platform Orchestration Questions? Get in Contact
Learn more about our solutions, and please contact us if you have any questions about designing and building platforms or implementing platform orchestrators.
You can also learn more about Kratix, our platform orchestration framework for building composable internal developer platforms, at kratix.io.
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