Platform Engineering and the Hype Cycle: Traversing the Trough of Disillusionment

The 2023 Gartner Hype Cycle placed Platform Engineering at the “peak of inflated expectations.” This could foreshadow a rough ride for platform builders, who must navigate the “trough of disillusionment” before they can expect to see productivity. However, all is not lost, as there are emerging practices, technologies, and strategies that have led to the creation of successful platforms over the last decade.

Join Cat Morris, Daniel Bryant, and Abby Bangser as they explore key themes that caused the Gartner team to caution about the challenges ahead. Drawing on Cat’s experience rolling out multiple cloud-native platforms and Daniel’s past life as an analyst, they will offer patterns, processes, and practical approaches to increase the chance of success with your platform engineering efforts.

As a spoiler, it’s all about treating the platform as a product, focusing on automating workflows, and building with an eye for day two operations and scaling.

- Overview of platform engineering’s placement on the Gartner Hype Cycle and the challenges for 2024 and beyond
- Discussion on the three key challenges from the analyst and implementer perspectives: enabling developers to ship faster, codifying and sharing organisational policies, and avoiding platform decay.
- Patterns and practical approaches you can apply to your platform-building efforts

Transcript

1. Platform Engineering and the Hype Cycle: Traversing the Trough of Disillusionment Abby Bangser Principal Engineer Daniel Bryant Head of Product Marketing Cat Morris Senior Product Manager
2. tl;dr • Platform engineering is about to enter the trough of disillusionment ◦ Gartner’s Hype Cycle for 2024 is providing cautionary insight! • There are three key challenges: ◦ Removing roadblocks for developers ◦ Codifying and sharing organisational policies ◦ Avoiding platform decay • The solution? Treat your platform as a product ◦ Everything-as-a service ◦ Process automation ◦ Fleet management
3. Setting the scene
4. Platform engineering and the Gartner Hype Cycle • By 2026, 80% of large software engineering organizations will establish platform engineering teams / Gartner Top 10 Strategic Tech Trends 2024 • 65% of orgs say “The platform team is important and is receiving continued investment” / Puppet State of DevOps 2024
5. Navigating over the peak and through the trough linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:7199307746356199424
6. We’re starting to hear of failures and challenges
7. Your platform must have clear goals Go faster: Platform teams need to provide “everything as a service” to help rapidly and sustainably deliver value to end-users Decrease risk: Teams need to automate manual processes in reusable components Increase efficiency: You need to manage and scale your digital platform and resources as a fleet
8. Three key challenges to avoid in the upcoming trough
9. Three key challenges to navigating the trough.. Removing roadblocks for developers Codifying and sharing organisational policies Avoiding platform decay Let’s look at the this from two perspectives: • Implementer • Analyst
10. Our panelists for today! Cat Morris: Product Manager @ Syntasso Previously: Thoughtworker, Platform Product Manager, Business Analyst, Developer Daniel Bryant, Product Marketing @ Syntasso Previously: Chief Scientist at OpenCredo, CTO, InfoQ Editor, Platform Engineer, Developer
11. Removing roadblocks for developers
12. Removing roadblocks for developers: Analyst • 50% of respondents can deploy less than once per week ◦ Accelerate State of DevOps Report 2023 • Platforms teams often navigate a healthy tension between ◦ Providing platform “proof of value” to dev teams, and ◦ Avoiding “build it and they will come” approaches • How can you address this? ◦ Talk to your customers: the developers ◦ Find a specific pain point and fix it ◦ Create an “enabling team”
13. Removing roadblocks for developers: Implementer Key points: • Shipping faster doesn’t only mean time elapsed waiting for “stuff” to happen ◦ We’re seeing teams want to avoid context switching and overburden with cognitive load ◦ Also for the Platform and DevOps teams who are having to manage increasingly complicated tooling, which means app teams are waiting even longer as those who are supporting them are context switching… its pain all the way down • Focus on serving the many, not the few. ◦ 20% of effort to serve 80% of needs. E.g Natwest, had great platforms for those trying to do complicated stuff but that still required a lot of knowledge that didn't actually help the majority of their engineering teams • However, developers only go faster with your platform if they are using it ◦ See the above point - a lot of teams where we had a lot of investment into features that very few people use. The ROI just isn’t there for a lot of platform initiatives because we didn’t think of the biggest points of value.
14. Codifying and sharing organisational policies
15. Codifying and sharing organisational policies: Analyst 59% [of developers] say that their AppSec requirements limit their ability to release code frequently Harness State of DevEx The biggest takeaway from our survey this year surprised us — not only are Platform Engineering teams supporting security and compliance efforts, but they are tackling and troubleshooting issues around security in a way that suggests this is going to be a much larger trend. 2024 Puppet State of DevOps Report 42% of developers say they can’t release code to production without risking failures Harness State of the DecEx 2024
16. Avoiding platform decay
17. Avoiding platform decay: Implementer Key points: • Not often a thing that we notice until it has set in • Measuring things may help, but in practice that drops to the bottom of the to-do list while you’re firefighting • Stepping back and intentionally designing the platform is essential.
18. Avoiding platform decay: Analyst • Establishing goals and measuring progress is essential • Leading indicators ◦ Adoption rates ◦ Onboarding times ◦ Time to nth PR • Lagging indicators ◦ App retention rate ◦ Incidents/near misses mitigated ◦ ROI (time saved) linkedin.com/posts/billblosen_thanks-to-co-author-annie-hodgkins-garcia-activity-7198399542365466624-7VHd
19. Previously, at a Syntasso webinar near you… syntasso.io/post/the-1-platform-engineering-problem-you-ve-never-heard-of-platform-decay-webinar-recap
20. Wrapping up
21. Conclusion • Platform engineering is about to enter the trough of disillusionment ◦ Gartner’s Hype Cycle for 2024 is providing cautionary tales! • There are three key challenges: ◦ Removing roadblocks for developers ◦ Codifying and sharing organisational policies ◦ Avoiding platform decay • The solution: Treat your platform as a product ◦ Everything-as-a service ◦ Process automation ◦ Fleet management
22. Thank you: Additional information Platform Engineering: Orchestrating Applications, Platforms, and Infrastructure (bit.ly/3UNxQei ) How to Take the First Step Towards Self Serve Internal Developer Platforms (bit.ly/4bLMzMD ) Platform Orchestrators: The Missing Middle of Internal Developer Platforms? (bit.ly/3URBoML )