Why Platform Engineering Is the Next Big Trend in IT Operations

Growth of Platform Engineering

Platform engineering has become one of the emerging trends in IT operations and management in 2023. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will have a platform engineering team delivering internal services, components, and application‑delivery tools as reusable resources. The Puppet “State of DevOps 2023: Platform Engineering edition” reports that 51% of adopters started within the past three years and 93% consider the adoption a step in the right direction.

What Is Platform Engineering?

According to Narayanan Raghavan, senior director of SRE at Red Hat, platform engineering’s function is to create and provide a common set of tools or components—such as CI/CD pipelines or developer toolchains—that developers can use as the foundation for product development. The goal is to eliminate the need for developers to think about their development environment or required systems before writing code.

Why Adoption Is Accelerating?

HashiCorp CTO Armon Dadgar notes that large organizations adopting cloud computing increasingly recognize the need for a platform team to manage cost, security, and compliance at scale. The first challenge is often simply establishing a dedicated platform team with clear executive sponsorship and a visible vision of how automation and standardization add value.

Successful platform teams partner closely with application teams or business lines to solve real customer problems, which drives internal advocacy and broader adoption.

Platform Engineering vs. DevOps and SRE

Experts from Puppet and Red Hat view platform engineering as an extension of DevOps rather than a competing discipline. Ronan Keenan of Puppet reports that 94% of respondents see platform engineering helping their organizations realize DevOps benefits, with “standardization” cited by 53% as a key advantage. While SRE focuses on reliability, observability, and central logging, platform engineering implements the systems and tools that bring consistency and speed to development teams.

Best Practices

Adopt a product mindset: Treat the platform as a product with a feedback loop to ensure it solves user problems.

Form a dedicated team: Create a team with a clear charter and executive backing.

Clarify the ultimate goal: Aim for fully automated end‑to‑end delivery, starting with a consistent pre‑production toolset, then IaC pipelines, and later observability, secret management, and service mesh.

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

View platform building as a journey: Collaborate with application teams to address their biggest pain points, building trust and expanding the platform’s scope over time.