May 07, 2024
How to Maximize Your Platform Engineering Initiatives
Platform engineering expands into a broad operational model for increasing the speed, quality and productivity of software development through scalable automation and improved security.
Platform engineering has changed significantly, evolving beyond DevOps processes to become a robust discipline for establishing software development and deployment systems. The practice of platform engineering is growing in multiple ways; not only are more organizations adopting it but they also are expanding the functions that they handle with it. Organizations that practice platform engineering effectively see higher levels of security, software quality and stability, accuracy, and speed of deployment.
As organizations enhance their platform engineering operations, many are incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate development, improve security and streamline their processes. However, organizations face challenges as they work toward these objectives, including the need to scale operations, overcome security issues, achieve compliance with regulatory standards and manage increasingly complex environments.
Automated tools can help organizations overcome these challenges, as can a partner with expertise in helping organizations optimize their platforms to manage costs, scale up operations, improve visibility and reinforce security.
Leverage the benefits of platform engineering inside your DevOps team and beyond.
Platform engineering has changed significantly, evolving beyond DevOps processes to become a robust discipline for establishing software development and deployment systems. The practice of platform engineering is growing in multiple ways; not only are more organizations adopting it but they also are expanding the functions that they handle with it. Organizations that practice platform engineering effectively see higher levels of security, software quality and stability, accuracy, and speed of deployment.
As organizations enhance their platform engineering operations, many are incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate development, improve security and streamline their processes. However, organizations face challenges as they work toward these objectives, including the need to scale operations, overcome security issues, achieve compliance with regulatory standards and manage increasingly complex environments.
Automated tools can help organizations overcome these challenges, as can a partner with expertise in helping organizations optimize their platforms to manage costs, scale up operations, improve visibility and reinforce security.
Leverage the benefits of platform engineering
inside your DevOps team and beyond.
Platform engineering has quickly grown from an iteration of DevOps thinking to a robust discipline, as evidenced by its inclusion in Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends list in 2023 and 2024. Like DevOps, platform engineering is not a collection of IT solutions but rather a pattern of building and maintaining the infrastructure and services that enable automation and systems to operate efficiently for software development. Higher productivity is the biggest payoff, according to a 2024 survey, along with better software, more stable applications, faster deployment and fewer errors.
Initially focused on creating standard interfaces within internal developer platforms (IDPs), platform engineering functions are expanding as organizations deploy it more widely. For example, platform engineers are focusing more on security: strengthening processes, troubleshooting problems and driving best practices. This reflects an overall trend toward leveraging platform engineering throughout IT operations.
Organizations that deployed predefined platforms for limited use cases are now finding new applications and using platform engineering principles to inform shared standards. Team topologies are also assembling their own platforms and practicing “dual pathing,” deploying different toolkits to different teams depending on their needs. This aligns with the concept of platform engineering as an architecture facilitating specific capabilities: The right tools for a particular environment are those that solve its unique technical and business challenges.
3-5 years
The most common length of time that organizations (43 percent) have had platform engineering teams
Source: Puppet, “2024 State of DevOps Report: The Evolution of Platform Engineering,” March 2024
Meanwhile, providers are responding with built-in tools for in-demand capabilities — such as container registries, sequence management and AI — so that organizations can implement foundational platforms and tailor them as needed while receiving holistic vendor support. The primary AI use case is code generation, helping to accelerate the pipeline through Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools. On the security side, AI can assess code to identify vulnerabilities and recommend remediations. AI is also becoming more prevalent on the operations side as part of full-stack observability, helping to improve the development-to-operations handoff.
Going forward, platform engineering will continue to be an asset that serves the entire enterprise by delivering efficiency and productivity.
CDW can help you leverage
platform engineering to improve
efficiency and productivity.
The Power of Platform Engineering
Platform engineering has quickly grown from an iteration of DevOps thinking to a robust discipline, as evidenced by its inclusion in Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends list in 2023 and 2024. Like DevOps, platform engineering is not a collection of IT solutions but rather a pattern of building and maintaining the infrastructure and services that enable automation and systems to operate efficiently for software development. Higher productivity is the biggest payoff, according to a 2024 survey, along with better software, more stable applications, faster deployment and fewer errors.
Initially focused on creating standard interfaces within internal developer platforms (IDPs), platform engineering functions are expanding as organizations deploy it more widely. For example, platform engineers are focusing more on security: strengthening processes, troubleshooting problems and driving best practices. This reflects an overall trend toward leveraging platform engineering throughout IT operations.
3-5 years
The most common length of time that organizations (43 percent) have had platform engineering teams
Source: Puppet, “2024 State of DevOps Report: The Evolution of Platform Engineering,” March 2024
Organizations that deployed predefined platforms for limited use cases are now finding new applications and using platform engineering principles to inform shared standards. Team topologies are also assembling their own platforms and practicing “dual pathing,” deploying different toolkits to different teams depending on their needs. This aligns with the concept of platform engineering as an architecture facilitating specific capabilities: The right tools for a particular environment are those that solve its unique technical and business challenges.
Meanwhile, providers are responding with built-in tools for in-demand capabilities — such as container registries, sequence management and AI — so that organizations can implement foundational platforms and tailor them as needed while receiving holistic vendor support. The primary AI use case is code generation, helping to accelerate the pipeline through Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools. On the security side, AI can assess code to identify vulnerabilities and recommend remediations. AI is also becoming more prevalent on the operations side as part of full-stack observability, helping to improve the development-to-operations handoff.
Going forward, platform engineering will continue to be an asset that serves the entire enterprise by delivering efficiency and productivity.
CDW can help you leverage
platform engineering to improve
efficiency and productivity.
The Data: A Look at Platform Engineering
65%
The percentage of technology professionals who say that their platform teams are important and receiving continued investment
Source: Puppet, “2024 State of DevOps Report: The Evolution of Platform Engineering,” March 2024
37%
The percentage of organizations using a “build it and they will come” approach to platform engineering adoption, versus advocacy (25%), internal champions (21%) and mandatory use (17%)
Source: Humanitec, “State of Platform Engineering Report: Volume 2,” March 2024
53%
The percentage of platform engineers who are actively using artificial intelligence in their work
Source: platformengineering.org, “Results Are In: The 2023 Platform Engineering Survey,” October 30, 2023
The Data: A Look at Platform Engineering
65%
The percentage of technology professionals who say that their platform teams are important and receiving continued investment
Source: Puppet, “2024 State of DevOps Report: The Evolution of Platform Engineering,” March 2024
37%
The percentage of organizations using a “build it and they will come” approach to platform engineering adoption, versus advocacy (25%), internal champions (21%) and mandatory use (17%)
Source: Humanitec, “State of Platform Engineering Report: Volume 2,” March 2024
53%
The percentage of platform engineers who are actively using artificial intelligence in their work
Source: platformengineering.org, “Results Are In: The 2023 Platform Engineering Survey,” October 30, 2023
- PLATFORM ENGINEERING CHALLENGES
- SOLVING PROBLEMS
- ACHIEVING SUCCESS
A collaborative culture and leadership committed to platform engineering increase the likelihood of successful impact. As with many IT initiatives, organizations’ biggest challenges often relate to people and processes. That said, the first imperative is to ensure that the foundational infrastructure can support platform engineering’s core capabilities.
SCALABILITY: As the user base grows, the platform must be able to scale up to handle the load. Obtaining buy-in on shared standards helps to keep the system elegantly simple, which protects scalability while enhancing speed and other attributes.
SECURITY: The platform must have measures to prevent unauthorized access and protect sensitive data, a requirement many platform teams are addressing aggressively. One survey found that 70 percent of organizations say that security is built into their platforms from the start.
Click Below to Continue Reading
COMPLIANCE: The platform must ensure that the software and the supply chain comply with relevant regulations, standards and best practices. Often, this a matter of understanding the regulations and being able to demonstrate compliance. While time-consuming, compliance is often a fruitful place to reduce time and costs.
COMPLEXITY: Integrating multiple systems, technologies and applications is inevitably complex and challenging to manage. For some organizations, part of the solution is to deploy multiple platforms to provide the tools best suited to specific roles and tasks.
AUTOMATION: Platform engineering teams leverage automation to reduce manual workloads and ensure consistency across the platform. For many teams, the biggest hurdle is determining what to automate and which tools will yield the best results.
FUNDAMENTALS: The platform must be highly available, with minimal downtime. Responsiveness and performance, with fast processing and minimal latency, is essential. Interoperability is also key, ensuring that the platform can integrate and communicate with other systems seamlessly and efficiently.
CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT: Platform engineering is an ongoing process, and best practices continue to emerge as teams refine their practice. The goal should always be to continuously improve and optimize the platform to meet changing user needs and technology trends.
Various motivations may lead organizations to adopt platform engineering, including a desire to increase delivery speed, scale up, reduce engineers’ workloads, control infrastructure expenses, eliminate duplicative work by multiple teams and simplify workflows as product catalogs grow. Ultimately, the objective is to solve problems. As platform engineering evolves, teams are expanding the scope of issues they can address, with 50 percent saying that increasing product delivery speed is their primary goal.
Many organizations are still assembling their platform teams and building internal capabilities. In this process, they often benefit from partnering with an expert, which can help ensure that solutions and strategies solve problems and achieve desired outcomes.
Intentionality matters: A critical insight from a recent Humanitec study is that “if you don’t build your platform, it will build itself.” While most organizations already have the major components of a platform, they also need a clear mission to guide implementation and increase the likelihood that platform engineering will meet both IT and business needs.
With that in mind, here are some important components to consider.
Click Below to Continue Reading
Platform engineering and the application of automation help organizations scale up many of the principles and practices associated with DevOps.
Scale Up DevOps Practices: The DevOps principle of continuous improvement allows for frequently merging code changes to a shared environment so that automated testing and validation can be conducted — and conflicts or discrepancies remediated — before changes advance down the pipeline. As with other fundamental components of DevOps, platform engineering can streamline and scale that practice by incorporating CI templates and other tools into IDPs.
Manage Costs: FinOps is both a practice and a set of tools that can be added to the pipeline to measure, forecast and evaluate changes based on cost. FinOps aims to improve communication among IT, engineering, business and finance stakeholders and increase clarity around trade-offs among cost, speed and quality so that organizations can monitor and manage development expenses effectively.
Focus on Developer Services: Service catalogs are essential components of IDPs. They organize and document available services across the development lifecycle, whereas IDPs contain the overarching operating tools and applications. When asked about key benefits for developers, teams cite the business outcomes enabled by platform engineering, but they also say that developers enjoy a reduced cognitive load and a greater ability to multitask.
Gain Visibility with GitOps: GitOps serves as a version control system and source of truth to ensure configuration files and source code match the desired declarations. Observability capabilities, together with continuous reconciliation between workflows and engineering objectives, allow for proper tracking and approval. By facilitating this visibility, GitOps increases trust in the pipeline’s integrity.
Scale Resources Quickly: IaC provides infrastructure management with reusable configuration files and versioning storage. IaC helps drive fast, scalable deployment through automated resource provisioning and standardized workflows that ensure consistent and repeatable development processes. The resulting capability to scale makes this an essential tool for platform engineering teams.
Reinforce Policy with Code: Policy as Code imposes structure and implements standards set by teams and organizations using code to define, disseminate, update and enforce policy. It’s particularly beneficial for security policies, in addition to areas such as compliance, configuration management and access control. As with other types of automation, Policy as Code reduces manual errors while increasing speed and efficiency.
Advance Security Tools: DevSecOps integrates security into development and operations processes — early and often — to discover and remediate security issues as they arise. According to GitLab, in 2023, 62 percent of developers will use AI and machine learning to check code as part of DevSecOps, up from 51 percent in 2022.
Leverage Security as Code: Security as Code is a subset of DevSecOps that establishes a single point of security review for every change. Scans, tests and other tools allow for deeper visibility so that corrections are timely and their impact is minimized. According to Puppet, platform teams say that increasing product delivery speed and improving security and compliance are among their top goals.
Part of platform engineering’s appeal is the potential to enhance nearly every aspect of the software development lifecycle.
Speed and Efficiency: Platform engineering facilitates faster time to market with a powerful combination of fundamental shifts and incremental improvements. For example, IDPs establish golden paths through pre-architected models that increase uniformity and reduce the number of tasks and decisions facing developers. Some organizations reach a middle ground of maturity (“clone and forget”) in which templates exist but are not viewed as fully developed and supported products. True golden paths serve developers effectively at every step, evolving as needed based on their feedback. Faster product delivery is the top driver for platform engineering adoption (closely followed by security/compliance improvements, infrastructure support and workflow development). These are aided by the ability to increase productivity (cited by 58 percent of organizations) and automate and standardize processes (51 percent).
Building Beyond Development: Developers are the internal customer for most modern operations teams, and platform engineering helps to keep them happy. Self-service IDPs address day-to-day workflows that affect developers by significantly reducing person-to-person dependencies, wait times, and resulting delays and frustrations. Increasingly, however, leaders see platform engineering as a resource to leverage across the organization. In addition to providing a path for developers, it can become an operational model for everyone in IT. A common approach is to stand up the initial instance on the development side and then use that as a vanguard for broader change. Platform engineering provides benefits to nonplatform teams, including improvements in efficiency, workflow, system reliability and security; increased standardization; and faster software delivery.
Enhanced Cybersecurity and Reduced Risk: Automation, pre-architecting, consistency and stability all reduce risk. The more closely developers cleave to the golden path, the more likely they are to maintain configurations, policies and processes that strengthen cybersecurity. Research suggests that platform engineering teams are helping to resolve security issues and designing and enforcing security processes within their organizations.
Click Below to Continue Reading
Engaging a third party to help plan, design and guide a platform engineering initiative can be the best way to achieve desired outcomes, shorten the learning curve and avoid costly delays or mistakes. Every IT environment is unique, and a partner such as CDW with experience across diverse organizations can help teams implement the right solutions and the best practices to optimize them. Key platform engineering services that CDW offers include:
Platform Engineering Foundation: This business-orientated workshop builds a platform engineering approach for a customer’s use case, including team and responsibility mapping and a sample pipeline build.
Platform Engineering Builds: We offer several options depending on organizational needs. For example, Multicloud GitOps Foundation includes best-in-class offerings around Kubernetes, based on GitOps methodology and using IaC.
Infrastructure as Code Workshop: In this engagement, CDW trains a team of up to 12 people on the specifics of IaC technologies using a platform of the customer’s choice.
DevSecOps Workshop: This workshop helps teams establish more effective security testing in an existing development pipeline, demonstrating the value of shifting security left and testing sooner.
- PLATFORM ENGINEERING CHALLENGES
- SOLVING PROBLEMS
- ACHIEVING SUCCESS
A collaborative culture and leadership committed to platform engineering increase the likelihood of successful impact. As with many IT initiatives, organizations’ biggest challenges often relate to people and processes. That said, the first imperative is to ensure that the foundational infrastructure can support platform engineering’s core capabilities.
SCALABILITY: As the user base grows, the platform must be able to scale up to handle the load. Obtaining buy-in on shared standards helps to keep the system elegantly simple, which protects scalability while enhancing speed and other attributes.
SECURITY: The platform must have measures to prevent unauthorized access and protect sensitive data, a requirement many platform teams are addressing aggressively. One survey found that 70 percent of organizations say that security is built into their platforms from the start.
Click Below to Continue Reading
COMPLIANCE: The platform must ensure that the software and the supply chain comply with relevant regulations, standards and best practices. Often, this a matter of understanding the regulations and being able to demonstrate compliance. While time-consuming, compliance is often a fruitful place to reduce time and costs.
COMPLEXITY: Integrating multiple systems, technologies and applications is inevitably complex and challenging to manage. For some organizations, part of the solution is to deploy multiple platforms to provide the tools best suited to specific roles and tasks.
AUTOMATION: Platform engineering teams leverage automation to reduce manual workloads and ensure consistency across the platform. For many teams, the biggest hurdle is determining what to automate and which tools will yield the best results.
FUNDAMENTALS: The platform must be highly available, with minimal downtime. Responsiveness and performance, with fast processing and minimal latency, is essential. Interoperability is also key, ensuring that the platform can integrate and communicate with other systems seamlessly and efficiently.
CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT: Platform engineering is an ongoing process, and best practices continue to emerge as teams refine their practice. The goal should always be to continuously improve and optimize the platform to meet changing user needs and technology trends.
Various motivations may lead organizations to adopt platform engineering, including a desire to increase delivery speed, scale up, reduce engineers’ workloads, control infrastructure expenses, eliminate duplicative work by multiple teams and simplify workflows as product catalogs grow. Ultimately, the objective is to solve problems. As platform engineering evolves, teams are expanding the scope of issues they can address, with 50 percent saying that increasing product delivery speed is their primary goal.
Many organizations are still assembling their platform teams and building internal capabilities. In this process, they often benefit from partnering with an expert, which can help ensure that solutions and strategies solve problems and achieve desired outcomes.
Intentionality matters: A critical insight from a recent Humanitec study is that “if you don’t build your platform, it will build itself.” While most organizations already have the major components of a platform, they also need a clear mission to guide implementation and increase the likelihood that platform engineering will meet both IT and business needs.
With that in mind, here are some important components to consider.
Click Below to Continue Reading
Platform engineering and the application of automation help organizations scale up many of the principles and practices associated with DevOps.
Scale Up DevOps Practices: The DevOps principle of continuous improvement allows for frequently merging code changes to a shared environment so that automated testing and validation can be conducted — and conflicts or discrepancies remediated — before changes advance down the pipeline. As with other fundamental components of DevOps, platform engineering can streamline and scale that practice by incorporating CI templates and other tools into IDPs.
Manage Costs: FinOps is both a practice and a set of tools that can be added to the pipeline to measure, forecast and evaluate changes based on cost. FinOps aims to improve communication among IT, engineering, business and finance stakeholders and increase clarity around trade-offs among cost, speed and quality so that organizations can monitor and manage development expenses effectively.
Focus on Developer Services: Service catalogs are essential components of IDPs. They organize and document available services across the development lifecycle, whereas IDPs contain the overarching operating tools and applications. When asked about key benefits for developers, teams cite the business outcomes enabled by platform engineering, but they also say that developers enjoy a reduced cognitive load and a greater ability to multitask.
Gain Visibility with GitOps: GitOps serves as a version control system and source of truth to ensure configuration files and source code match the desired declarations. Observability capabilities, together with continuous reconciliation between workflows and engineering objectives, allow for proper tracking and approval. By facilitating this visibility, GitOps increases trust in the pipeline’s integrity.
Scale Resources Quickly: IaC provides infrastructure management with reusable configuration files and versioning storage. IaC helps drive fast, scalable deployment through automated resource provisioning and standardized workflows that ensure consistent and repeatable development processes. The resulting capability to scale makes this an essential tool for platform engineering teams.
Reinforce Policy with Code: Policy as Code imposes structure and implements standards set by teams and organizations using code to define, disseminate, update and enforce policy. It’s particularly beneficial for security policies, in addition to areas such as compliance, configuration management and access control. As with other types of automation, Policy as Code reduces manual errors while increasing speed and efficiency.
Advance Security Tools: DevSecOps integrates security into development and operations processes — early and often — to discover and remediate security issues as they arise. According to GitLab, in 2023, 62 percent of developers will use AI and machine learning to check code as part of DevSecOps, up from 51 percent in 2022.
Leverage Security as Code: Security as Code is a subset of DevSecOps that establishes a single point of security review for every change. Scans, tests and other tools allow for deeper visibility so that corrections are timely and their impact is minimized. According to Puppet, platform teams say that increasing product delivery speed and improving security and compliance are among their top goals.
Part of platform engineering’s appeal is the potential to enhance nearly every aspect of the software development lifecycle.
Speed and Efficiency: Platform engineering facilitates faster time to market with a powerful combination of fundamental shifts and incremental improvements. For example, IDPs establish golden paths through pre-architected models that increase uniformity and reduce the number of tasks and decisions facing developers. Some organizations reach a middle ground of maturity (“clone and forget”) in which templates exist but are not viewed as fully developed and supported products. True golden paths serve developers effectively at every step, evolving as needed based on their feedback. Faster product delivery is the top driver for platform engineering adoption (closely followed by security/compliance improvements, infrastructure support and workflow development). These are aided by the ability to increase productivity (cited by 58 percent of organizations) and automate and standardize processes (51 percent).
Building Beyond Development: Developers are the internal customer for most modern operations teams, and platform engineering helps to keep them happy. Self-service IDPs address day-to-day workflows that affect developers by significantly reducing person-to-person dependencies, wait times, and resulting delays and frustrations. Increasingly, however, leaders see platform engineering as a resource to leverage across the organization. In addition to providing a path for developers, it can become an operational model for everyone in IT. A common approach is to stand up the initial instance on the development side and then use that as a vanguard for broader change. Platform engineering provides benefits to nonplatform teams, including improvements in efficiency, workflow, system reliability and security; increased standardization; and faster software delivery.
Enhanced Cybersecurity and Reduced Risk: Automation, pre-architecting, consistency and stability all reduce risk. The more closely developers cleave to the golden path, the more likely they are to maintain configurations, policies and processes that strengthen cybersecurity. Research suggests that platform engineering teams are helping to resolve security issues and designing and enforcing security processes within their organizations.
Click Below to Continue Reading
Engaging a third party to help plan, design and guide a platform engineering initiative can be the best way to achieve desired outcomes, shorten the learning curve and avoid costly delays or mistakes. Every IT environment is unique, and a partner such as CDW with experience across diverse organizations can help teams implement the right solutions and the best practices to optimize them. Key platform engineering services that CDW offers include:
Platform Engineering Foundation: This business-orientated workshop builds a platform engineering approach for a customer’s use case, including team and responsibility mapping and a sample pipeline build.
Platform Engineering Builds: We offer several options depending on organizational needs. For example, Multicloud GitOps Foundation includes best-in-class offerings around Kubernetes, based on GitOps methodology and using IaC.
Infrastructure as Code Workshop: In this engagement, CDW trains a team of up to 12 people on the specifics of IaC technologies using a platform of the customer’s choice.
DevSecOps Workshop: This workshop helps teams establish more effective security testing in an existing development pipeline, demonstrating the value of shifting security left and testing sooner.
Leverage the benefits of platform engineering
inside your DevOps team and beyond.
IN THIS ARTICLE
Challenges Around Platform Engineering
Solutions and Services to Support Platform Engineering
Achieving Success in Platform Engineering
What is Platform Engineering? An Introduction
DevOps has had a transformative influence on IT, increasing the pace and stability of development processes. Now, it’s beginning to advance platform engineering, a natural maturation of DevOps and a response to some of its shortcomings.
According to Gartner, the goal of platform engineering is “a frictionless, self-service developer experience that offers the right capabilities to enable developers and others to produce valuable software with as little overhead as possible.”
While DevOps implemented cloud-native tools that enabled scalability, availability and operability, it also represented a significant jump in complexity. That complexity has challenged many organizations, especially if their development capabilities are less mature. Other organizations have struggled to achieve desired objectives. For example, one survey found that almost 80 percent of organizations stagnate in their DevOps journeys, with limited examples of success.
DevOps is also resource-intensive, requiring customized tools and applications for each project. Platform engineering simplifies and streamlines these tools — and developers’ access to them — by creating shared, consistent resources to support developers across the organization. These may range from tools such as Docker and Kubernetes, which package cloud-driven applications in a simple, repeatable stack, to overarching practices such as Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and Policy as Code (PaC).
As a natural outgrowth of DevOps, platform engineering involves building and maintaining the infrastructure and services that facilitate efficient, cloud-native software development. Evan Bottcher, head of data and architecture at business management platform MYOB, describes these platforms in a blog post as “a foundation of self-service APIs, tools, services, knowledge and support, which are arranged as a compelling internal product. Autonomous delivery teams can make use of the platform to deliver product features at a higher pace, with reduced coordination.”
Ultimately, platform engineering helps organizations automate in alignment with specific goals so they can reap the benefits of DevOps at scale and get to market more quickly.
A Platform for Smoother Development
For developers, platform engineering resolves the tension between overreliance on operations teams for essential tasks and an overabundance of choice.
An internal developer platform helps teams become more efficient, ultimately lowering organizational costs while creating a more productive and enjoyable experience for developers.
Internal Developer Platforms treat developers as internal customers with clearly defined needs, goals and resource constraints. Self-service platforms eliminate the burdensome aspects of DevOps while ensuring that developers have the tools they need.
IDPs help to create a “golden path” that defines and supports an optimal process for fast, smooth development. That, in turn, helps to reduce security risks while ROI.
DevOps depends on continuous integration and continuous delivery, but some activities increase (CI/CD) complexity, such as changing configurations; adding variables, services and dependencies; debugging; and spinning up new environments. While platform engineering can simplify and streamline this work, it also can present challenges as organizations implement or refine engineering processes.
A PRODUCT-FOCUSED MINDSET
Platform engineering is an ongoing process, and teams must continuously improve and adapt the platform to ensure that it continues to meet evolving needs and reflect technology trends. Successful teams adopt a product management approach, conceiving platforms as customer-focused products emphasizing “value, viability and usability,” according to Forrester.
ALL SYSTEMS GO
Bringing multiple systems, technologies and applications into a cohesive platform is a complex endeavor. Such systems may include containers, configuration management tools and IaC resources, such as Terraform. In addition, the platform must communicate seamlessly and effortlessly with other systems and platforms, which means that interoperability is crucial.
ALL ABOUT PERFORMANCE
Increasing delivery speed is a top driver of platform engineering, so performance and availability are paramount. Another primary goal is to enable developers to focus on code rather than on managing infrastructure. To achieve both aims, platforms must be responsive, with low latency, fast processing and few disruptions.
SCALE AND AUTOMATE
Scalability is intrinsic to DevOps, and organizations must protect that feature when transitioning to platform engineering. As the user base grows, platforms must be able to scale up without compromising performance. Engineers also must be proficient with automation, leveraging it effectively to maintain consistency and reduce manual workloads.
SECURITY AND COMPLIANCE
Platforms must address potential security threats by implementing measures to prevent unauthorized access and protect sensitive data. Incorporating security tools and processes into platforms — and educating developers about vulnerabilities and misconfigurations — increases the likelihood of catching issues early. Platforms also must comply with relevant regulations, standards and best practices.
Learn how an expert partner can help you resolve your platform engineering challenges and reap greater benefits.
Platform Engineering on the Rise
80%
By 2026, the percentage of software engineering organizations that will use internal platform teams to provide reusable services, components and tools for application delivery1
93%
The percentage of organizations that say platform engineering is a step in the right direction; 44 percent call it a “big step”2
68%
The percentage of organizations that say platform engineering has increased development velocity2
71%
The percentage of organizations that plan to hire people with platform engineering experience within the next 12 months2
38%
The percentage of developers who use a portal or other central place to find tools and services3
93%
The percentage of top performers who use an IDP built and maintained by a platform team, using a Platform as a Product approach4
Sources: 1gartner.com, “What Is Platform Engineering?” Oct. 5, 2022; 2Puppet, “State of DevOps Report 2023,” January 2023; 3Stack Overflow, 2022 Developer Survey, June 2022; 4Humanitec, DevOps Benchmarking Study 2023, March 2023
Various motivations may lead organizations to adopt platform engineering, including a desire to increase delivery speed, scale up, reduce engineers’ workloads, control infrastructure expenses, eliminate duplicative work by product teams and simplify workflows as a product catalog grows. Ultimately, the objective is to solve problems; 54 percent of IT professionals who work with platforms say that’s the primary goal, according to a report by Puppet.
Many organizations are still assembling their platform teams and building internal capabilities. In the process, they often benefit from partnering with an expert, which can help ensure that solutions and strategies solve problems and achieve desired outcomes.
Intentionality matters: A critical insight from a recent Humanitec study is that “if you don’t build your platform, it will build itself.” While most organizations already have the major components of a platform, they also need a clear mission to guide implementation and increase the likelihood that platform engineering will meet both IT and business needs.
With that in mind, here are some important components to consider.
Scale Up DevOps Practices
The DevOps principle of CI allows for frequently merging code changes to a shared environment so that automated testing and validation can be conducted — and conflicts or discrepancies remediated — before changes advance down the pipeline. As with other fundamental components of DevOps, platform engineering can streamline and scale that practice by incorporating CI templates and other tools into IDPs.
Manage Costs
FinOps is both a practice and a set of tools that can be added to the pipeline to measure, forecast and evaluate changes based on cost. FinOps aims to improve communication among IT, engineering, business and finance stakeholders and increase clarity around trade-offs among cost, speed and quality so that organizations can monitor and manage development expenses effectively.
Focus on Developer Services
Service catalogs are essential components of IDPs. They organize and document available services across the development lifecycle, whereas IDPs contain the overarching operating tools and applications. When asked about the most critical functions of platform engineering work, teams cite service provision as a priority nearly as important as workflow automation and infrastructure building and management, according to Puppet.
Gain Visibility with GitOps
Git serves as a version control system and source of truth to ensure configuration files and source code match the desired declarations. Observability capabilities, together with continuous reconciliation between workflows and this desired end state, allow for proper tracking and approval. By facilitating this visibility, GitOps increases trust in the pipeline’s integrity.
Scale Resources Quickly
Infrastructure as Code provides infrastructure management with reusable configuration files and versioning storage. IaC helps drive fast, scalable deployment through automated resource provisioning and standardized workflows that ensure consistent and repeatable development processes. The resulting capability to scale makes this an essential tool for platform engineering teams.
Reinforce Policy with Code
Policy as Code imposes structure and implements standards set by teams and organizations using code to define, disseminate, update and enforce policy. It’s particularly beneficial for security policies, in addition to areas such as compliance, configuration management and access control. As with other types of automation, PaC reduces manual errors while increasing speed and efficiency.
Advance Security Tools
DevSecOps integrates security into development and operations processes — early and often — to discover and remediate security issues as they arise. According to GitLab, in 2023, 62 percent of developers will use artificial intelligence and machine learning to check code as part of DevSecOps, up from 51 percent in 2022.
Leverage Security as Code
Security as Code is a subset of DevSecOps that establishes a single point of security review for every change. Scans, tests and other tools allow for deeper visibility, so corrections are timely and their impact is minimized. According to Puppet, platform teams say building and enforcing security processes and improving observability are among their top goals.
Partner with a CDW Expert
Engaging a third party to help plan, design and guide a platform engineering initiative can be the best way to achieve desired outcomes, shorten the learning curve, and avoid costly delays or mistakes. Every IT environment is unique, and a partner such as CDW with experience across diverse organizations can help teams implement the right solutions and the best practices to optimize them. Key platform engineering services that CDW offers include:
• Platform Engineering Foundation
This business-orientated workshop builds a platform engineering approach to a customer’s use case, including team and responsibility mapping and a sample pipeline build.
• Infrastructure as Code Workshop
In this engagement, CDW trains a team of up to 12 people on the specifics of IaC technologies using a platform of the customer’s choice.
• DevSecOps Workshop
This workshop helps teams establish more effective security testing in an existing development pipeline, demonstrating the value of shifting security left and testing sooner.
• Multicloud GitOps Foundation
This service delivers a complete build of best-in-class offerings around Kubernetes, based on GitOps methodology and using IaC.
Part of platform engineering’s appeal is the potential to enhance nearly every aspect of the software development lifecycle.
Speed and Efficiency
Platform engineering facilitates faster time to market with a powerful combination of fundamental shifts and incremental improvements. For example, IDPs establish golden paths through pre-architected models that increase uniformity and reduce the number of tasks and decisions facing developers. Some organizations reach a middle ground of maturity (“clone and forget”) in which templates exist but are not viewed as fully developed and supported products. True golden paths serve developers effectively at every step, evolving as needed based on their feedback. Among teams that have adopted platform engineering, 68 percent report an increase in development speed, and 42 percent see “a great deal” of improvement in this area, according to Puppet. The longer organizations have platform teams, the more these and other benefits continue to grow.
Experience and Performance
Developers are the internal customer for most modern operations teams, and platform engineering helps to keep those customers happy. Self-service IDPs address the day-to-day workflows that affect developers most by significantly reducing person-to-person dependencies, waiting times, and resulting delays and frustrations. Moreover, while platform engineering directly benefits developers and their teams, it also pays dividends for infrastructure teams and entire organizations. Self-service and autonomous capabilities tie directly to development team performance. High-performing teams are far more likely than low-performing ones to allow developers to create preview environments without waiting for engineering approval or operations provisioning, according to Humanitec. High performers also have more autonomy to access information, deploy to development and staging environments, provision infrastructure, and assign resources.
Enhanced Cybersecurity and Reduced Risk
Automation, pre-architecting, consistency and stability all reduce risk. The more closely developers cleave to the golden path, the more likely they are to maintain configurations, policies and processes that strengthen cybersecurity. According to Puppet, 55 percent of teams say platform engineering improves overall security. Standardization also makes it easier to integrate the work of security teams.
Story by Neil Wylie and Peggy Alexander
