Platform Engineering That Empowers Users and Reduces Risk

Developing software and building digital capabilities is becoming ever more complex. By 2026, 80% of large software engineering organizations will establish platform engineering teams as internal providers of reusable services, components and tools for application delivery — up from 45% in 2022.

In this context, developers must build and operate an assembly of complicated services, such as cloud-based Kubernetes clusters. Agile empowerment of teams often adds complexity to the landscape of solutions employed — resulting in duplication, especially as a result of mergers and acquisitions.

Platform engineering has emerged in response to this increasing cognitive load resulting from the complexity of modern software tools and architectures. It centers on building pathways or platforms that ease the burden on developers, which, in turn, releases the productivity of software engineering teams and improves the developer experience.

Since it helps users and reduces friction in the valuable work they do, forward-thinking companies have created platform engineering teams to build platforms that sit between the user and the underlying services or platforms on which they rely.

• Improving user and developer experience, and increasing productivity and delivery of customer value by establishing a platform engineering approach and initiative. 

• Making tools less complex and easier to use by adopting a product management approach to developing internal platforms, the core of platform engineering. This includes appointing a platform engineering product owner to prioritize first steps based on user and developer experience research.

• Enhancing platforms by implementing minimum viable and self-service platforms that address user pain points. This includes iterating with user feedback to minimize waste and target investment where it makes a difference. 

• Mandating controls, such as architecture and security, instead of platform adoption. This includes enabling teams to choose to self-comply with these requirements, or follow the compelling “paved road” of platform engineering. 

By 2027, platform engineering principles will influence more than 50% of infrastructure and operations technology decisions — a substantial increase from less than 20% today.

Not surprisingly, as I&O environments become more complex, enterprise stakeholders often resist security measures and deployment processes considered to be impediments to speed and adaptability. This makes it hard for I&O teams to deliver solutions that meet user needs, protect the organization from risk, maintain resiliency and control costs.

However, well-engineered platforms enable developers and end users to execute digital strategies. And the platform engineering principles that underpin the design and building of platforms that support software development can guide the adoption of infrastructure platforms to help developers and end users do their jobs.

I&O leaders must drive the design and operation of infrastructure platforms to ensure that all aspects of infrastructure technology engineering and operations are shaped by these principles. They must also incorporate an efficient talent management strategy to spearhead your platform engineering efforts.

Platform engineering is an iterative perspective involving multiple teams and stakeholders. These principles offer your teams a common understanding and help streamline decision making and maintain focus on improving the end-user experience.

The platform should: 

• Provide a self-service experience to improve flow and reduce user cognitive load and frustration.

• Provide explicit and consistent APIs for the integration and automation of features into processes outside the platform.

• Provide a user-friendly “paved road” that aligns with security, architecture and compliance guidelines.

• Be modular and allow teams to choose to use — or combine — capabilities as they see fit.

• Be product-managed and focus on features that meet the needs of the many, rather than the few.

• Identify, support and encourage good practices — and not be prescriptive.

• Enforce core requirements to protect the organization and its customers, and meet compliance demands.

• Be observable and empower teams to use metrics and track data trends to proactively address operational challenges and inform the platform roadmap.
  

• Encourage contributions from the broader community to enhance the platform.

• Provide predictable availability and performance measured against service-level objectives. 

By applying platform engineering principles and design patterns into infrastructure solutions, I&O teams can better manage the tapestry of hybrid components and ensure that the operations run smoothly and efficiently.

This requires them to incorporate platform engineering principles into the development of infrastructure management requirements, product selection, and the deployment and operation of solutions. They must choose infrastructure platforms built on common foundational elements with common architectures that are API-driven, programmable and composable.

I&O leaders must also develop infrastructure platforms collaboratively with platform users. This means teams must approach the platform with the mindset that it is never finished — because user requirements are not static.

By 2027, more than 75% of Fortune 1000 companies will have formal infrastructure platform organizations — up from less than 20% in 2023.

In this context, many I&O metrics and SLAs are based on organizational and technology silos and intended for I&O efficiency and resiliency. As such, they are not closely aligned with enterprise business outcomes and cause I&O to be viewed as an obstacle to modernization and not a partner. 

Moreover, isolated infrastructure projects often cause I&O teams to focus more on incrementalism than transformation — leading to deployments that are costly to manage, resistant to automation and difficult to change.

To position platform teams for success in executing enterprise digital strategies, I&O leaders should: 

• Improve user experience by leveraging enterprise metrics centered on performance and outcomes aligned to enterprise objectives.

• Change the infrastructure operational model from projects to products to improve focus on enterprise digital needs.

• Adopt self-service and automation to drive agility and scale.

Though some see enterprise requirements as being far removed from I&O activity, general enterprise-level business requirements should guide I&O in the process of selecting, building and operating infrastructure platforms. For I&O to align with enterprise objectives, it must be a help — not a hindrance — by providing a business-enabling digital infrastructure foundation.

General enterprise requirements that must be factored into every infrastructure platform include:

• Speed to market

• Scale

• Security

• Cost efficiency

• Resiliency

I&O leaders must also consider requirements across different personas — from novice consumers to sophisticated users with skills in disciplines like application development, data and analytics and infrastructure. 

I&O leaders must therefore be continually aware of customer requirements, and iteratively evolve infrastructure and services as requirements change. Awareness also includes a strategy to educate stakeholders about platform existence and training, changes and releases, and opportunities to offer feedback and celebrate platform achievements.

DevOps, Agile and related development approaches are the preferred ways to rapidly create and continuously deliver the software products and services that fuel digital environments. DevOps toolchains are the technology platforms that support the automation of this continuous delivery. 

Indeed, by 2027, 80% of large organizations will embrace platform engineering to successfully scale DevOps initiatives in hybrid cloud environments — up from less than 30% in 2023.

As organizations seek to adopt, extend and deploy DevOps platforms into complex hybrid cloud environments, they need flexibility, consistency, improved speed, reduced costs and enhanced performance and efficiency — particularly in the cloud migration phase.

However, managing and delivering the overall requirements for — and technical debt within — the DevOps toolchain across complicated hybrid cloud environments is complex and creates a heavy cognitive load for development teams. 

Beyond this, hybrid cloud environments bring new regulatory compliance and security requirements. And governance across disparate solutions can be disruptive and costly to implement and automate.

It is in this challenging environment that platform engineering can be leveraged to provide the platform as a product to control costs and improve speed, consistency, efficiency, flexibility and agility as enterprises scale to hybrid cloud.