A survey of 326 software engineering leaders conducted by Futurum Research finds that adoption of platform engineering as a methodology for building and deploying applications at scale is gaining significant traction.
More than a quarter of respondents (26%) have mastered platform engineering, compared to 41% who are still working toward applying platform engineering across multiple projects. Another 24% are still working toward operationalizing a set of best practices for platform engineering, while 7% are just getting started.
Roughly half of platform engineering teams provide cloud/multi-cloud management (52%) and dev/test/production environment support (48%). DevOps toolchains (43%), standard platform configurations (42%), and containers/Kubernetes (41%) support are also prevalent in platform engineering teams.
Metrics being used to track whether platform engineering teams are successful include developer productivity (64%), fewer security incidents or failures (62%), software release frequency (59%), developer satisfaction (58%), reduction of costs (50%) and reduced complexity (29%).
Over the next 12-18 months, a significant percentage of organizations are increasing their spending on development environments (79%), automated deployment (79%), developer portals (75%), and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms (67%). The survey also notes that platform engineering (43%) teams are already using artificial intelligence to further automate workflows.
Mitch Ashley, vice president and practice lead for DevOps and application development practice at The Futurum Group, said while it’s clear platform engineering is starting to have a source multiplier effect, software engineering teams will also need to reassess returns on investment (ROI). Platform engineering teams are now influencing technology and platform decisions being made across the entire enterprise, he added.
The Futurum Group projects that, overall, the platform engineering market, valued at $10.8 billion in 2024, will expand to $15.9 billion by 2028.
The degree to which platform engineering is being adopted varies widely from one organization to another, but the overall goal is to streamline processes by centralizing the management of DevOps workflows using a standard set of tools and platforms. The paradox that gets created as organizations adopt platform engineering is that DevOps, in many cases, gained traction as a rebellion against inflexible centralized IT teams that historically tried to enforce standards with an iron fist.
The issue that has arisen, however, is that many application developers today are spending too much time managing development environments rather than writing code. Platform engineering will enable application developers to focus more of their time and energy on writing business logics versus mastering all the nuances of, for example, infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools or an instance of Kubernetes.
In effect, platform engineering advocates are making a case for a kinder, gentler form of centralized IT that seeks to provide all the benefits in a way that is flexible enough for application developers to embrace different tooling. In an ideal world, platform engineering represents the establishment of a social contract through which centralized IT teams will view application developers as their customers rather than just another end user they are chartered to manage within the context of a set of inflexible rules.
Some organizations have even gone so far as to provide application developers with two different laptop PCs. One for accessing standard DevOps platforms and the other to experiment with new tools that one day might be added to the portfolio of DevOps platforms supported by the platform engineering team.
Regardless of approach, the one certain thing is that as more platform engineering standards are adopted, the overall pace at which applications are built and deployed should only continue to accelerate.