Platform engineering has been gaining traction over the last few years, with some likening it to the next iteration of DevOps. Gartner has called it one of the top strategic trends of 2024 – and has predicted that 80% of large software engineering organizations will establish platform engineering teams by 2026. But what’s driving the momentum?
I believe it’s a result of maturity in the adoption of the cloud by enterprises of all sizes and shapes. As more and more enterprises started using the cloud and embraced DevOps as a path towards quickly taking features to the market, there was a clear need to rethink how the underlying infrastructure and platforms were used for enterprise applications. Platform engineering emerged as the new path to building and managing the underlying application infrastructure.
It’s been a growth year for platform engineering, but in today’s era of hybrid-cloud-meets-generative-AI, we see new trends emerging in this space. So, what’s next? Here is what we expect to see as we head into 2024.
Product-Centric Funding Model
Traditionally, IT was seen as a gatekeeper and cost center. With the cloud, developers gained more leverage in procuring the infrastructure they wanted for their applications. Enterprises realized the value of modernizing their IT operations to meet this modern need and wanted to transform their cloud operations to be part of the innovation team. They see platform engineering as the transformational approach that aligns cloud operations with developers and business users. However, platform engineering requires a product-centric funding model instead of project-centric models in the past, as a product-centric model doesn’t have a start and end date like projects and aligns closely with the product lifecycle with ongoing funding. Enterprises need to recognize this shift from the status quo widely, and we expect this realization to come for businesses in 2024.
Platform Engineering as an Extension to DevOps
As enterprises embraced DevOps to accelerate their application development, they still used the traditional gatekeeping models with cloud operations. The embrace of traditional guardrails in the cloud created friction and slowed innovation. With its “as code” model, platform engineering is well suited for reducing friction and accelerating innovation. We expect organizations to embrace platform engineering as the natural extension of DevOps to operate at the speed of business.
Generative AI Capabilities
Generative AI is at the peak of the hype cycle as we close out 2023, and in 2024, we will see some enterprise-ready use cases come to life. Generative AI will augment platform engineering with code assistants to create infrastructure-as-code, governance-as-code and security-as-code to ensure smooth Day 2 operations. We will also see chatbots leveraging generative AI to help SREs and other platform engineering pros with documentation, infrastructure playbooks and other relevant use cases.
2024 is a critical year for organizations as they fend off the economic forces and embrace technological advancements to compete in the global market. Most CXOs will see platform engineering as the top strategic trend to focus on because it brings productivity and cost efficiencies to their organization. This is only the beginning, and the coming decade will be defined by platform engineering, laying a firm foundation for AI-driven innovation in enterprises.