Hello everyone and welcome back to the Cognixia podcast. Every week, we dig up a new topic from emerging digital technologies and share insights, ideas, information, stories, and more. We strive to inspire our listeners to learn new things and update their repertoire of skills to stay relevant and continue growing in their careers.
As a discipline, platform engineering has been around for quite some time now. It has continued to expand, both as a community and as a professional discipline, being shaped by the constantly evolving needs of modern organizations. Platform Engineering recently released its 3rd State of Platform Engineering Report which revealed some interesting insights. For instance, most of the organizations that were surveyed for this Report have had platform teams for less than two years while only 13% of the respondents were found to be working in the platform engineering space for more than five years. Now, as a discipline, platform engineering is way older than that, so why is this happening? And, why this sudden spike in hiring platform engineering professionals?
Platform engineering as a discipline is generally defined as the discipline of designing and building toolchains & workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations in the cloud-native era. Platform engineers would provide an integrated product called the internal developer platform or IDP which would cover the operational necessities of the entire lifecycle of the application. With this definition, there is considerable overlap between the roles of platform engineers and data platform engineers.
So, is platform engineering replacing DevOps?
Not by a long shot. But look at it as the next phase in the evolution of digital transformation. Platform engineering complements and supports DevOps in some ways. A platform would help engineering organizations go closer to delivering the promise as well as desirable outcomes of DevOps.
The State of Platform Engineering found respondents opining that their organizations were building Internal Developer Platforms to plug the gaps in DevOps. The Report also finds that while automation is one of the key principles of DevOps, the survey respondents found themselves doing too many repetitive tasks that could otherwise have been automated. This lack of automation and standardization was one of the main reasons organizations were setting up platform engineering teams. Other common reasons companies were embracing platform engineering included the absence of developer self-service capabilities, the need for a more secure and compliant infrastructure, and the desire to accelerate the time-to-market.
With DevOps having effectively broken down the proverbial silos between development and operations teams, there is considerable focus now not just on the development teams but on the infrastructure and operations teams too. In line with this, platform engineering should not focus exclusively on the developer experience but also ensure that it supports the operations and infrastructure teams suitably. Over-optimization of developer experience could harm the infrastructure team’s efficiency. Thus, the requirements being received from all the teams involved in platform engineering should be appropriately balanced. After all, all stakeholders deserve attention and support.
On this front, at the end of 2024, the State of Platform Engineering Report finds that platform engineering teams globally have shifted away from over-supporting the DevEx and made the right moves to address the complexity of cloud environments. The respondents have shared that the common focus areas for platform engineering in their organizations include standardizing infrastructure provisioning & consumption through the Internal Developer Platform, improving developer experience & productivity by building the IDP, implementing and managing Infrastructure-as-Code, introducing IDP over the existing CI/CD setup, provide helpdesk support for developers, and create dashboards for executives. A whole 68.03% of the teams surveyed are now prioritizing infrastructure standardization.
At the end of 2024, according to the State of Platform Engineering Report, the global platform engineering industry is still in the process of maturing. Most organizations are in the early stages of platform maturity, focusing on ad-hoc operations, extrinsic push for adoption, as well as limited measurement practices. However, there are some organizations, albeit a few, who have reached the advanced stages of platform engineering with their investments optimized, smooth intrinsic adoption & integrated interfaces, as well as comprehensive measurement. Most organizations are also allocating personnel and funds to platform capabilities, in a dedicated but reactive manner. A smaller number of organizations treat their platforms as products with their funding allocation decisions driven by data and proactive planning. Sadly, most organizations are also embracing platform engineering owing to extrinsic push, landing in situations where they have no choice but to adopt it. However, this is in line with the industry being in its young stages and not yet quite mature. This would also not internal users to see much intrinsic value in adopting platform engineering.
Offering standard tooling with some degree of consistency to users is also becoming quite commonplace. Self-service solutions offering a much higher degree of autonomy to users are also slowly coming to the fore. However, only 9.09% of organizations have achieved integrated services that seamlessly embed platform capabilities into existing tools. Additionally, only 10.74% of organizations at the most mature level of platform engineering have managed services that are proactive and fully integrated.
The biggest issue in platform engineering today must be measurement. According to the Report, a whopping 44.67% of organizations do not measure any metrics, indicating a substantial gap in success tracking for platform engineering initiatives. 37.30% of organizations have started using DORA metrics, so there is some attention to operational performance. Here, DORA metrics are the deployment efficiency and reliability indicators, like lead time, deployment frequency, MTTR, change failure rate, etc. An even smaller group at 11.48% measures the time-to-market so there is obviously a limited focus on product delivery speed.
That’s the industry at large, but where do platform engineers stand as the year draws to a close? Currently, the primary focus of platform engineers is CI/CD followed closely by Kubernetes and platform orchestration, and Infrastructure-as-Code. They also handle other aspects of platform engineering like developer portals, networking, and serverless. As AI increasingly gets integrated into platform engineering, skills relevant to that are also seeing a gradual demand.
When you read the entire Report, one thing becomes quite clear – platform engineering is moving beyond the initial buzz and hype phase, and it will continue growing & maturing from here. Organizations must avoid plunging into platform engineering without a solid framework or sufficient product management experience. This could make it challenging to demonstrate value beyond anecdotal evidence. And, get that workforce trained, they really need those skills. Talk to Cognixia today, we would be happy to help you in every way we can.
With that, we come to the end of this week’s episode of the Cognixia podcast. We will be back again next week with another interesting & exciting new episode.
Until then, happy learning!
