A global survey of 420 application developers published this week by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) finds that while more than a quarter (28%) work for organizations that have a dedicated platform engineering team responsible for internal platforms, another 72% have adopted a multi-team approach (41%) or have no formal approach at all (31%).
Shared this week at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe conference, the survey also finds only 19% of developers working for organizations that are building artificial intelligence (AI) workflows have a separate, dedicated platform.
Conducted by the market research firm SlashData on behalf of the CNCF, the report also identifies Armada, GitHub Actions, Helm, cert-manager and Kube Resource Orchestrator (kro) as tools that have matured to the point where more than 85% of respondents familiar with them give them a four or five star rating.
Armada, a tool for building and deploying microservices, took top honors with 96% of developers familiar with the technology giving it a four or five star rating, followed closely by Helm, a package manager for Kubernetes clusters, at 94%. GitHub Actions, meanwhile, received a score of 89%, while kro and cert-manager both received four or five star ratings from 87% of developers familiar with them.
Liam Bollmann-Dodd, principal market research consultant at SlashData, said that when it comes to platform engineering it appears more organizations are relying on a coalition of willing DevOps engineers to function as the platform engineering team.
Bob Killen, a senior technical program manager for the CNCF, added it is also apparent that the development of AI applications is being added to existing software engineering workflows managed by those same teams.
While there is a lot of interest in adapting best platform engineering practices to increase application developer productivity and reduce costs, there is not a lot of consensus on how to achieve that goal. Some organizations have clearly opted to create a dedicated platform engineering team. Others may be moving in that direction, but in the short term at least many appear to have opted to try to better align existing DevOps teams.
The challenge, as always, is striking the right balance. While there is a desire to streamline processes by centralizing the management of DevOps workflows using a standard set of tools and platforms. Many application developers today are spending too much time managing development environments rather than writing code. However, organizations can go too far. Many teams adopted DevOps in the first place to escape the tyranny of a centralized IT team that historically tried to enforce standards. Platform engineering teams need to make 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 fact, in an ideal world platform engineering would be well advised to create 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 inviolable mandates that need to be enforced without exception.