Developer experience shouldn't be the only focus of your internal developer platform; driving business impact is just as important.

By Brian Wald, Head of Global Field CTO Org at GitLab

Platform engineering, which centralizes best practices and components for development teams, is gaining prominence as DevSecOps practices and frameworks become increasingly embedded across organizations. Platform engineering aims to normalize and standardize developer workflows by providing developers with optimized "golden paths" for most of their workloads and flexibility to define exceptions for the rest. 

Gartner predicts that by 2026, 80% of large software engineering organizations will establish platform engineering teams as internal providers of reusable services, components and tools for application delivery, up from 45% in 2022. Platform engineering allows organizations - especially larger organizations with many engineering initiatives happening in parallel - to scale DevSecOps principles and tooling more easily. This is incredibly important when businesses are pressured to do more with less.

DevSecOps has created significant benefits in speed, cost and agility. Still, larger organizations have struggled with adoption due to cost, difficulties hiring sufficient staff and entrenched legacy technology stacks. If not thoughtfully implemented, the traditional DevOps approach can also result in local tooling silos, with each team choosing the tools and processes that work best for them but that don't necessarily work well for the company as a whole.

Organizations can follow one of two paths when developing a new platform engineering initiative. One option is to build an authentication and visualization layer that sits across multiple point tools - but this won't solve the underlying problems of legacy technology stacks and tooling silos, so it's not likely to be a long-term solution. The other option is to implement an internal developer platform (IDP) that reduces the cognitive load on developers by bringing multiple technologies and tools into a single self-service experience. 

Key Business Benefits of Platform Engineering

Increase speed to market: Platform engineering promises to help organizations deliver better-quality software faster and more cost-efficiently. Building a platform engineering team will pay off over the long term, enabling large organizations to move quickly with less tooling, resulting in significant cost savings.

Reduce security and compliance risks: Less tooling and more normalized workflows reduce organizations' compliance overhead and potential attack surface. According to IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report, the global average data breach cost in 2023 was $4.45 million. Still, organizations that managed their attack surface effectively could contain breaches faster.

Improve developer experience (DevEx): DevEx is a growing priority, with companies competing to attract and keep the best developer talent. Platform engineering teams can help improve the developer experience by building efficient, automated workflows or golden paths and lifting some manual, extraneous tasks from developers' workloads. This simplifies their day-to-day, allowing them to efficiently build, test and deploy applications and focus on more impactful, business-critical work.

Platform Engineering Best Practices

Start With the Culture

If "platform" describes what we should build, then "engineering" describes how it should be built. Too many organizations leap into buying and installing technology without considering how they'll need to evolve their organizational culture to make the adoption a success. Just because an organization implements an IDP doesn't mean developers will adopt it.

Platform engineering teams should consider themselves product owners, with developers as their customers. They should conduct discovery to understand developers' needs and then reach out to end users to help them become successful with the resources provided. This requires marketing, communication and customer support skills, which are often lacking in very technical teams.

The key here is a product-oriented mindset and culture, which allows platform engineering teams to focus on creating value for their end users (developers) by listening to user feedback and continuously iterating and improving their product (the developer platform). Leaders should create an environment where team members feel empowered to seek ways to help their specific (internal) customers. They'll be focused on making it as easy as possible for people to consume their services - likely through self-service interfaces or programmable APIs.

Stay Focused on Delivering Business Value

When starting a platform engineering initiative, organizations may be tempted to look at highly productive teams and copy what they do. Unfortunately, they often put too much emphasis on the model team's structure or tools. But structure and tools are often the results of a highly productive team, not the cause. Leaders should instead focus on the business outcomes they want to see and then identify the right tools and team structures to achieve those goals.

Define the goal of your platform engineering practice in terms of business impact. Developing software faster is great - but why? What business goal does it serve?

Increasing speed and agility, for instance, is a common goal - but there could be several business goals behind it. Slow time to market has an obvious opportunity cost, as organizations must make difficult choices about what products to prioritize. Organizations that can move more quickly are also better equipped to respond to fast-moving markets. And there are security implications - organizations must know they can respond quickly and efficiently if a security incident occurs.

Common productivity and efficiency metrics are helpful, but leaders should try translating those metrics into dollar values to clarify the business value. For example, suppose a platform engineering effort reduces the time a new developer takes to perform their first commitment to production. In that case, the organization is saving a certain percentage of that developer's year-one salary and part of the salary of those around them who are helping them onboard. The organization will also likely increase retention, reducing the need for expensive hiring (including advertising, recruiters and lengthy interview cycles).

Leaders can optimize platform engineering initiatives by staying laser-focused on business value to drive the right results.

Build For Everyone

The early adopters of a developer platform might be the most visible (and vocal) early in the process. However, remember that early adopters - who, based on the diffusion of innovations theory, typically make up less than 20% of an organization - may have very different needs than most users who will eventually leverage the platform. As you define the golden paths that make sense for your organization, ensure you're building for the majority, not just early adopters.

One common golden path worth investing in early is an end-to-end CI/CD pipeline supporting a particular type of workload on one set of target platforms (such as Kubernetes). Once this base workload is supported, it provides a strong foundation for others and confidence that the platform can deliver value. Define your organization's priority golden paths regarding the business outcomes they enable.

Doing More With Less

Platform engineering's benefits include faster time to market, reduced security and compliance risk, and improved developer experience. Establishing a product-oriented culture and setting clear business goals are critical for success in platform engineering. It's clear that platform engineering has never been more important than today, as businesses strive to do more with less. 

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brian Wald is Head of Global Field CTO org at GitLab. He leads a dynamic team of Field CTOs dedicated to transforming enterprise software development practices.