Why Is Platform Engineering the Next Big Trend in IT Operations?

Platform engineering growth is one of the emerging trends in IT operations and management for 2023.

It is not exactly DevOps nor SRE, but an overlapping approach that combines both disciplines.

Gartner predicts that by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will have platform engineering teams delivering internal services, components, and application delivery tools as reusable resources. According to Puppet's State of DevOps 2023 Report, 51% of organizations have adopted it in the past three years, and 93% of respondents say adopting platform engineering is a step in the right direction.

According to Red Hat SRE senior director Narayanan Raghavan, platform engineering creates and provides a common set of tools or components—such as CI/CD pipelines or developer toolchains—that developers can use as a foundation for product development, aiming to eliminate the need for developers to think about their development environment before writing code.

1. Why is platform engineering adoption increasing?

One area driving the rise is CloudOps. HashiCorp CTO and co‑founder Armon Dadgar notes that large organizations increasingly adopt platform engineering as they mature their cloud journeys, needing to manage cost, security, compliance, and other operational concerns. Platform teams help provide scalable shared capabilities, but creating such a team often lacks administrative support and requires clear leadership vision.

Success depends on partnering with application teams or business lines to solve customer problems, which promotes internal advocacy for adoption.

2. Platform Engineering vs. DevOps

Understanding the exact position of platform engineering within IT operations can be confusing; some view it as an extension of DevOps. Ronan Keenan of Puppet says platform engineering is an extension that can unlock DevOps at scale. Their 2023 DevOps State report shows 94% of respondents agree platform engineering helps realize DevOps benefits, with 53% citing increased standardization.

Raghavan sees SRE as an implementation of DevOps, while platform engineering is the result of both, focusing on building modules and developer tools to improve engineering efficiency and productivity.

3. Platform Engineering Best Practices

Adopt a product mindset: Ensure feedback loops with users and build systems that solve real problems.

Create a dedicated team: Establish a team with a clear charter to avoid treating platform work as a side task.

Understand the ultimate goal: Aim for fully automated end‑to‑end pipelines, starting with consistent pre‑production toolsets, then IaC pipelines, and eventually application services such as observability and secret management.

Choose the right tools: Select tools developers want to use to reduce adoption friction.

Iterative journey: Treat platform building as a multi‑step journey, collaborating closely with application teams to address their biggest pain points and build trust.

Reference: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/615813768

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