The world is constantly becoming more and more aware of the importance of sustainability in every aspect of our daily lives from buying groceries to traveling, and the IT world is no exception. Indeed, sustainability is already gaining importance in software development. For example, in the latest version of Thoughtworks’ Technology Radar, “carbon efficiency as an architectural characteristic” is one of the new techniques of interest. Moreover, in its research “Predicts 2023: Environmental Sustainability Is Now an IT Sourcing Imperative,” Gartner states that “by 2026, 75% of organizations will increase business with IT vendors that have demonstrable sustainability goals and timelines, and will seek to replace vendors that do not.”

This shows that there is a growing need for sustainability. How is the software development industry responding to this need? Many great initiatives are arising, but platform engineering, in particular, helps make software more sustainable.

What is Platform Engineering?

According to Gartner’s definition, platform engineering is “the discipline of building and operating self-service internal developer platforms (IDPs) for software delivery and life cycle management.” This trend has gained momentum in the last few years, and an increasing number of organizations are adopting internal developer platforms (IDPs) to scale their development process. IDPs allow developers to self-service the technology they need, whether it is infrastructure, runtime resources or ready-to-use services. This helps speed up the development process and ensures higher-quality software.

Platform engineering is becoming more and more popular and foundational. According to Gartner, “by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams as internal providers of reusable services, components and tools for application delivery.” Therefore, given the expected widespread adoption of IDPs in the next few years, sustainability emerges as a requirement. Ignoring or underestimating the importance of sustainability may cause organizations to waste all the benefits ensured by an internal developer platform.

Platform Engineering for Economically Sustainable Software

To survive and operate properly in the market, a company has to be economically sustainable and therefore stable. Usually, software is an asset that contributes to revenue generation for the company, but it still has maintenance costs. To make software economically sustainable, the total cost of ownership (TCO) needs to be lower than the generated income.

An internal developer platform can lower software product costs, making them more sustainable. How so? In a nutshell, by sharing resources that can serve multiple products and can be reused across multiple projects. Such resources include, but are not limited to, capabilities, processes, infrastructure, configuration, etc. Since the platform at scale manages shared capabilities, there product teams won’t waste time and effort replicating it every time. While lowering the TCO, this characteristic of platforms also contributes to reducing the software’s time to market.

Moreover, platform costs are shared across the whole organization and are not part of the TCO of each software product. This helps software to be more sustainable from an economic point of view.

Platform Engineering for Environmentally Sustainable Software

When talking about sustainability, most people usually think about the environment. While respecting the environment is one of the most important factors, it is important to note that sustainability is not limited to this aspect.

An internal developer platform can help software be more sustainable on two levels.

• Observability: The platform should collect and easily expose metrics on the environmental impact of the software. Such metrics can include hardware resource usage, energy consumption and CO2 footprint.
• Optimization: The platform should foster the adoption of sustainable patterns, like the ones provided by the Green Software Foundation. It should also include solutions that actively help reduce energy consumption, such as kube-green.

It is important that both of these capabilities are present and implemented in the platform. Observability without optimization is useless, and optimization without observability cannot be done.

Platform Engineering for Socially Sustainable Software

When speaking about sustainability, social responsibility cannot be forgotten. The first social responsibility of each organization is toward its members and employees. Does developer self-service also have social implications? Yes, it does; mainly by improving the developer experience.

Indeed, an internal developer platform helps organizations’ members to:

• Reduce friction between teams: Since everyone can have everything they need right when they need it, there will no longer be bottlenecks and misunderstandings between different teams. This contributes to a better working environment where everyone feels welcome and more productive.
• Decrease repetitive tasks and cognitive load for developers: Since the platform will manage and automate interactions with infrastructure and runtime, developers will no longer need to waste time and energy on such out-of-scope secondary tasks. This way, developers are more focused on their actual job of developing new features and they will feel more satisfied.
• Enable work from anywhere at anytime: Since the platform can provide all technology and capabilities whenever a developer needs them, it will no longer be required that people work together in the same location and at the same time. In other words, IDPs enable remote and asynchronous ways of working. This allows organizations to offer remote working and to create distributed teams, ensuring a better work-life balance for the team members.

All of this brings happier employees that will be more productive and satisfied with their work, which will reduce turnover.

Conclusion

The need for a more sustainable world is gaining momentum and involves every industry, including software development. No wonder Gartner included sustainable technology in the “Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2023,” along with platform engineering. As platform engineering is being adopted by more and more organizations to accelerate software development, sustainability has to be addressed.

An internal developer platform can help developers build more sustainable software. Platform engineering can help in all of these aspects, improving not only the developer experience but also the organization and the environment. This is just the beginning of the sustainable path platforms should follow, but the outlook is very encouraging.