01. Market Insights for Platform Engineering

Platform Engineering: Key Trends

The Platform Engineering term is the hottest buzzword in the tech industry, second only to AI. But is the emerging platform engineering approach new?

In his ebook What Happened to Platform Engineering? Dan Donahue, Principal Solutions Architect at Nethopper, says: platform engineering seems to be a new concept to many. It is not. Platform engineering simply moved from Software Engineering to DevOps/IT. Therein lies the awakening of DevOps/IT folks to platform engineering and the challenge it presents for them.

One of such a challenge is the 21% success rate of app modernization projects, according to this survey: 79% of Application Modernization Projects Still Fail After 16 Months and $1.5M.

The reasons for such a high failure rate are many, but Chris Munford, Nethopper's CEO/founder, says in "The Challenge of Modern Application Development" there is a common element in all of them: the increase of cognitive load on the developer, which leads to decreased productivity, project delays, budget overruns, and eventually failed projects.

Before diving into it, let's first explore the industry buzz about platform engineering in the sections below:

What Is Platform Engineering and Why It Matters

Platform engineering can accelerate the delivery of applications

Gartner says that platform engineering is an emerging technology approach that can accelerate the delivery of applications and the pace at which they produce business value.

According to Gartner:  

• Platform engineering can improve developer experience and productivity by providing self-service capabilities with automated infrastructure operations.

• By 2026, Gartner estimates that 80% of large software engineering organizations will establish platform engineering teams as internal providers of reusable services, components and tools for application delivery.

• Platform engineering will ultimately solve the central problem of cooperation between software developers and operators.

• 75% of organizations with platform teams will provide self-service IDPs to engineers.

Platforms curate and present foundational capabilities

As per CNCF, platforms curate and present foundational capabilities, frameworks and experiences to facilitate and accelerate the work of internal customers such as application developers, data scientists and information workers. Particularly in cloud computing, CNCF says that: Platforms have helped enterprises realize values long promised by the cloud like fast product releases, portability across infrastructures, more secure and resilient products, and greater developer productivity.

Solving the common cloud native problems with open source tools

In the book "Platform Engineering on Kubernetes," author Mauricio (Salaboy) Salatino shows you: How to solve the common cloud native problems with open source tools, like adopting Kubernetes with multiple teams, deploying to multiple cloud providers, and working with different stacks. Mauricio also talks in his book about emerging best practices from the Kubernetes community.

Betting on platform engineering with Kubernetes

Michael Levan, an industry expert, explains why he's betting on platform engineering with Kubernetes in his blog. As stated by Michael Levan, Kubernetes didn’t bring us anything new from a functionality perspective. The key difference is HOW Kubernetes did it. The “how” behind it, which is the extendable API, is why Kubernetes became so popular. Michael emphasizes that: Having a platform underneath the hood that has the ability to be 100% fluent and extendable for anything we need it to do is the true key to iteration.

Platform engineering is the future of software delivery

As the head of both product at Humanitec and the Platform Engineering Community, Luca Galante says platform engineering is the future of software delivery. Luca defines platform engineering as the discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations in the cloud-native era. In Luca's words: Platform engineers provide an integrated product most often referred to as an “Internal Developer Platform” covering the operational necessities of the entire lifecycle of an application

Platform engineering increases development velocity

The Puppet-sponsored State of Platform Engineering Study, reports about the key benefits of platform engineering, including:

• 68% orgs are experiencing an increase in development velocity with platform engineering.

• 93% of orgs say that platform engineering adoption is a move in the right direction.

• +55% of orgs with platform engineering are experiencing improved productivity and overall security.

• 50% of organizations with platform engineering are experiencing improved system reliability.

When Platform Engineering Meets Open Source

The new platform engineering approach

Platform engineering with a cloud-native approach is all the rage because it lets you create apps that can effortlessly scale, stay robust, and deploy smoothly in the cloud. You get to leverage the power of containerization and microservices architecture, alongside automated scaling mechanisms, which facilitates rapid development and deployment cycles.

The Buzz Surrounding Platform Engineering

This study estimates the Platform Engineering Market will reach USD 5.1 billion by 2033 with a CAGR of 25.1% during 2023-2033. It also mentions the integration of AI and ML into applications and services has emerged as a significant driving force in the platform engineering market.

With so much buzz around platform engineering, enterprises' CIOs/CTOs/platform engineering/DevOps teams are searching for the right platform engineering approach that is future-proof and can help them accelerate their IDPs and gain development velocity and app modernization success.

Keep on reading!