Ballooning lead and process time, with an opaque corollary relationship to fixed and marginal cost, is a significant and complex burden for any enterprise. And multi-cloud complexity and inefficient organizational and technical processes are some of the most wasteful areas companies face–so much so that Synergy Research reports organizations are cutting back on their cloud spend as tech budgets continue to fall under intense scrutiny, resulting in a Q1 2023 cloud spending growth rate of 19% compared to 32% just last year. With cloud cost containment a top priority, Forrester advised tech leaders to demonstrate to CFOs how they will stay on budget and demonstrate ROI at the board level. A key area where companies can eliminate expensive waste and increase time to value is the relationship and workflow between IT and developers, which, while being the DevOps charter for nearly 15 years, has gotten less attention among the viable cost-containment strategies for enterprises in 2023. Revisiting the latest iteration of this DevOps charter through the implementation of platform engineering strategies can help enterprises create a faster, leaner and more scalable dynamic. Let us examine why it’s now time for enterprises to consider platform engineering as a potent way to not only increase efficiency but also to bridge the divide between DevOps and IT.
The Old Way: Forcing DevOps to Dance to the ITSM Tune
In traditional enterprise organizations, IT typically dictates a top-down ITSM practice that limits the tools an organization can use for development and deployment; in many cases, it inhibits CI/CD and other core capabilities and practices of DevOps. This awkward attempt to accommodate modern DevOps practice through an aging ITSM paradigm has led to a suboptimal software delivery performance and poor developer experience (DX).
McKinsey, highlighting the criticality of DX, found developers at a leading SaaS provider spent 20% to 30% of their time integrating different services such as firewall changes, DNS and security access to deliver code through its CI/CD pipeline. That’s a lot of time spent on low-value, repetitive tasks, ensuring a painful journey for a disappointing result. If the DX pain is high enough, developers often go around IT and create resources on their own, leading to shadow IT, adding new cost burdens and growing security exposures. Every minute and engineer count: Five minutes saved per day among 500 developers saves a week’s development time.
Surely, there is a better way.
Platform Engineering: Collaboration Through Composition
Platforming engineering and “platform as a product” have been key to the PaaS ecosystem for years but are now gaining fresh traction in the industry. In Puppet’s State of DevOps Report, 51% of respondents said they had already adopted platform engineering and 93% said it was a step in the right direction. Gartner predicted 80% of software engineering organizations will have platform teams by 2026.
The concept can be defined in several ways. Gartner reported platform engineering is “an emerging trend intended to modernize enterprise software delivery… designed to support the needs of software developers and others by providing common, reusable tools and capabilities, and interfacing to complex infrastructure.” PlatformEngineering.org’s recent blog post defines it as the discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows for self-service capabilities in software engineering organizations during the cloud-native era.
Regardless of definition, platform engineering is the latest iteration of IT centralization, though now attempting to retain all the benefits of distributed team empowerment through “composition” rather than converged control. As modernization continues, we experience the ebb and flow of composition and decomposition, both organizationally and technically. Microservices, Kubernetes, and GitOps patterns pushed the rational limits of decomposition and significantly raised the level of technical complexity in the enterprise. The natural counter pressure is a new cycle of composition that aims to simplify that complexity through platform engineering practices. Teams now look for these toolchains and workflows to be centralized in internal developer platforms (aka IDPs), exposing the development, deployment and maintenance of the entire life cycle of modern, cloud-native applications.
IDPs can facilitate the flow, speed and innovation DevOps teams are demanding without sacrificing stability, security and control. They enable developers to configure their toolchain while meeting all controls through approved blueprints or “golden paths,” reducing lead and process time. Developers can focus on delivering business value instead of infrastructure tasks.
Bringing IT and DevOps Back Into Alignment Saves Time, Money and Sanity
Platform engineering creates a collaborative framework that connects IT and DevOps teams, so they can focus on outcomes rather than methods. Developers can use an IDP to follow conventions that speed up development and prevent anti-pattern creep. Guardrailing choices through golden paths reduce cognitive load and simplify execution context for security teams. The result? Developers can focus on what they were hired for and want to do–creating innovative, transformative applications and differentiated value. Security can sleep well knowing bespoke behavior isn’t opening new attack surface areas.
On the Day 2 operations side, IDPs enable SRE and support teams to have a fleet-wide view and work effectively with developers to streamline the management of production needs across all applications, clouds and tech stacks.
The reframing of composition breaks the false dichotomies between IT and DevOps practices. You don’t have to choose between control and flow, change isn’t triggered by serial requests or async events, safety isn’t found in planning or speed, value isn’t found in stability or innovation and administrative plane primitives aren’t servers or clusters. Platform engineering practices allow you to prioritize composition, orchestration, golden paths, holistic scalability and fleet management to get teams out of entrenched myopia and embrace systems thinking that gets your business delivering strategic gain instead of tactical win/loss tallies.
Finally, platform engineering positively impacts software delivery and operational performance metrics by streamlining development processes and reducing manual efforts. The bottom line is faster time to market while ensuring more consistency, less human error and improved software quality. This maximizes productivity, minimizes downtime and optimizes resource utilization, leading to cost advantages and increased efficiency for enterprises.
