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What is the state of platform engineering in 2023? Puppet’s special platform engineering edition of their annual DevOps report dives in. Here are the highlights. Let’s get bakin’

What's the state of platform engineering?

Puppet recently released the 2023 State of DevOps Report: Platform Engineering Edition – yet another sign that platform engineering is here to stay! But what does the report have to say? Here’s the short version.

1️⃣ Platform engineering helps realize the benefits of DevOps, at least according to 94% of the 438 individuals surveyed. Specific benefits include an increase in development velocity (68%), improved system reliability (60%), increased productivity and efficiency (59%), and better workflow standards (57%).

93% of respondents believe adopting platform engineering is a good move. Additionally, 37% of respondents from companies with platform engineering report being "very satisfied" with the efficiency of their product delivery process, compared to only 20% of those from companies without platform engineering.

2️⃣ Organizations are recognizing the benefits of platform engineering. The further along an organization is in their platform engineering journey, the better the results and the more confident the organization becomes. This leads to more hiring for platform team roles.

53% of firms that have practiced platform engineering for over three years report a significant improvement in speed, compared to 35% of firms that have implemented it within the last three years.

71% of respondents said their organization plans to hire people with platform engineering experience over the next year, with the majority (53%) planning to hire within the next 6 months.

3️⃣ Organizations are not investing enough in product management skills on their platform teams. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: you need product management for your platform. Having a product manager role on the platform team is essential for developing a product mindset, promoting the platform, and effectively educating the company about the platform’s capabilities.

Respondents' top priorities for the platform team align with product management responsibilities, such as increasing awareness of platform capabilities (47%), setting realistic expectations for the platform team’s role in the organization (44%), and keeping up with industry trends and feature requirements (37%). Despite this, firms are more likely to focus on other roles rather than product management, with 48% of roles falling under "DevOps," followed by 45% software engineers, and 44% platform engineers.

Short on time? ⏳ We got you 🥐😋

🥐 What does platform engineering look like at a startup? This article dives in.

🥐 InfoQ shared software trends to look for in 2023. (And platform engineering made the list 😉)

🥐 This article incorporates a lot of great perspectives on (and predictions for!) platform engineering: “It’s not really DevOps. Platform engineering has changed and evolved. It’s more than that.”

🥐 Data Platforms and Hadoop have made the life of SREs, operators, and platform engineers difficult. This next webinar will show you how converging data applications onto micro service platforms running on Kubernetes can destress operations and increase the performance and overall satisfaction of developers. Join us!

Have you joined the Platform Engineering Slack channel? If not, you're missing out. Here are some job opportunities recently shared by the community:

• Observability with Grafana and Prometheus
• How to successfully embed DevX devs in other teams
• Running keycloak to authenticate traffic for istio

And that’s a wrap on this week! As always, this newsletter is a community project, so if you have anything awesome to share from the cloud-native world, send it our way.

Stay crunchy 🥐

Luca