Cléber Alexandre Agazzi, Head of Infrastructure & IT Operations, Sicredi
Cléber Alexandre Agazzi is Head of Infrastructure & IT Operations at Sicredi, with over 15 years of IT leadership experience. He specializes in platform engineering, DevOps, cloud solutions, and digital workplace strategies. Cléber drives infrastructure optimization, agile and scalable IT environments, and innovation to support business growth and operational resilience in a cooperative financial institution.
In an exclusive interview with CIOReview Agazzi shared his invaluable insights regarding the industry, along with the prevailing developments and challenges.
In today’s enterprise landscape, the race to deliver software faster is often hindered by the growing complexity of hybrid cloud infrastructure. As organizations adopt multi-cloud strategies and modernize legacy systems, the operational burden on development and infrastructure teams increases. Platform Engineering emerges as a strategic response to this challenge, offering a way to streamline delivery while abstracting infrastructure complexity.
What Is Platform Engineering?
Platform Engineering is the discipline of designing and building internal platforms that serve as a product for software developers. These platforms provide reusable components, standardized workflows, and self-service capabilities that empower teams to deploy applications quickly and reliably. Unlike traditional infrastructure management, Platform Engineering focuses on developer experience, automation, and scalability, enabling teams to focus on delivering business value rather than managing environments. It also helps reduce cognitive load for both development and infrastructure teams by streamlining repetitive tasks and centralizing complexity into platform layers.
The Dual Benefit: Speed and Simplicity
At its core, Platform Engineering delivers two transformative benefits. First, it accelerates software delivery by providing developers with frictionless access to environments, tools, and pipelines. This reduces lead time and increases deployment frequency. Second, it abstracts the complexity of hybrid cloud infrastructure. By encapsulating cloud configurations, security policies, and operational standards into platform layers, organizations can simplify Governance, and in doing so, reduce operational and security risks. This dual benefit translates into faster time-to-market and more resilient systems.
Real-World Application
Leading companies around the world have embraced Platform Engineering as a core strategy to scale operations, boost developer productivity, and reduce the complexity of modern environments. Spotify, Netflix, Adidas, and Mercado Livre are notable examples, each building internal platforms to unify tools, standardize workflows, and treat developers as internal customers. These initiatives reflect a broader industry shift toward treating platforms as products, with a strong focus on autonomy, discoverability, and continuous improvement.
The next frontier lies in intelligent automation. Artificial Intelligence will increasingly enhance the user journey, offering contextual recommendations, predictive provisioning, and automated troubleshooting 
Inspired by these global references, Sicredi has been consolidating its own Platform Engineering strategy. By building internal platforms tailored to our teams’ needs, we’ve enabled faster delivery cycles and improved consistency across environments. Our approach emphasizes automation, observability, and integration with hybrid cloud services, allowing us to scale efficiently while maintaining control.
We operate in a highly complex environment: over 1,000 deployments per day, more than 5,000 microservices, 6,000 databases, 70+ Kubernetes clusters, and 4,000 Kafka topics, all running across three private datacenters and a public cloud provider. Managing this scale requires more than just tooling; it demands a strategic platform mindset.
Equally important is the cultural shift: we treat the platform as a product. This means applying product management principles to internal tooling, understanding user needs, prioritizing features, and continuously improving the developer experience. It fosters a culture of ownership, collaboration, and long-term thinking, where platform teams act as product teams serving internal customers.
We also view Platform Engineering through the lens of user journey. At Sicredi, this journey begins the moment a development team decides to create a new software component and continues all the way through its operation in production. Along the way, the platform supports every interaction, from provisioning environments and configuring pipelines to managing observability and compliance. This end-to-end experience is designed to be seamless, empowering teams to focus on innovation while the platform handles the complexity behind the scenes.
The Strategic Role of Open Source in Platform Engineering
Open source technologies play a pivotal role in enabling Platform Engineering at scale. By leveraging community-driven innovation, organizations can build flexible, cost-effective platforms that evolve rapidly and adapt to changing business needs. Internal Developer Portals (IDPs) like Backstage empower teams with intuitive interfaces and self-service capabilities, enhancing developer experience and reducing onboarding time.
In hybrid cloud environments, tools like OpenStack provide a robust foundation for private cloud infrastructure, offering control and customization without vendor lock-in. For CI/CD pipelines, ArgoCD and GitLab deliver automation, traceability, and integration across diverse environments. Meanwhile, Kubernetes and Kafka serve as core building blocks for scalable, event-driven architectures, enabling resilience and agility in complex systems.
The strategic value of open source lies not only in its technical capabilities but also in its cultural alignment with Platform Engineering principles: transparency, collaboration, and continuous improvement. By embracing these tools, organizations can accelerate innovation while maintaining autonomy and reducing operational overhead.
What’s Next
Since 2020, Platform Engineering has gained significant traction across the enterprise technology landscape. Recognized by leading analysts such as Gartner, Forrester, and Google Cloud/ESG, it has evolved from a niche concept into a strategic priority for organizations seeking agility, scalability, and resilience. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish dedicated platform teams, a reflection of its central role in improving developer experience and accelerating value delivery. A study by Google Cloud and ESG found that 55% of companies have already adopted Platform Engineering, and 90% plan to expand its use, viewing internal platforms not just as technical tools, but as products that drive innovation and operational excellence. Forrester reinforces this perspective, highlighting the importance of Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) in scaling cloud-native practices with governance, elasticity, and speed.
This growing relevance reflects a broader shift in how companies view internal platforms, not merely as infrastructure, but as engines of innovation.
Looking ahead, the next frontier lies in intelligent automation. Artificial Intelligence will increasingly enhance the user Journey, offering contextual recommendations, predictive provisioning, and automated troubleshooting. It will also bring even greater speed to software delivery and reduce the cognitive load associated with repetitive tasks, allowing teams to focus on innovation and strategic problem-solving. Platforms will become more adaptive, learning from usage patterns to optimize performance and reduce friction.
We also foresee deeper integration with FinOps practices, enabling real-time visibility into cost and resource efficiency. This will empower teams to make smarter decisions without compromising speed or autonomy. Ultimately, Platform Engineering will expand beyond infrastructure and delivery, becoming a central nervous system for innovation, connecting people, processes, and technology in a unified experience.