Today, platform engineering is one of the fastest growing areas in the modern datacenter and platform engineer is the newest title and role being sought after. It makes sense. Technology platforms are the bedrock of enterprises, and companies that have built modern, cloud-native data centers rely on some of the most innovative technology platforms available.
At Illuminas, a Radius Company, we’re fascinated with the evolution of job titles, roles and technology solutions being used within IT organizations. Ten years ago, we weren't talking about cloud architects, but today it’s one of the most in demand roles within IT. Similarly, 5-years ago lots of technology companies were talking about the platforms they were selling, and IT organizations were talking about the platforms they were building, but there were very few people calling themselves platform engineers and talking about platform engineering.
As with many previous technology transitions in the market, Illuminas has been right there, conducting research into this emerging area. In October of 2024, Red Hat commissioned Illuminas to look at the state of platform engineering in the US, UK and APAC (ANZ, Hong Kong and Singapore) markets. The goal of the study was to assess the extent to which platform engineering, and everything that goes with it, was being adopted by medium and large enterprises across industries. The sampling design for this study focused specifically on IT decision makers with platform engineering titles and IT decision makers who weren't using that title.
More importantly for our design, we only surveyed companies that were using public cloud technology and services for their cloud-native application platforms. A little more than a third (38%) of these companies are also using their own data centers to run cloud-native applications.
Most of the organizations we surveyed (86%) are developing and running cloud-native applications, AI applications or AI-enabled applications (66%), SaaS applications delivered to customers or internally (63%), and more than half (56%) are deploying containerized workloads. Almost one-third (31%) are managing between 51 and 100 applications, and just over a third (37%) are managing more than 100 applications. If you can imagine the complexity of infrastructure and skills required to make all of this happen, you understand why the platform engineer and platform engineering have become so important.
To fully understand the State of Platform Engineering, Illuminas created a maturity index to see where organizations placed themselves on the adoption journey. One out of seven (14%) enterprise companies surveyed were early in their journey and were 'exploring'. Just over a quarter (27%) considered themselves as 'emerging' in terms of their platform engineering efforts. The largest group of enterprises from a maturity perspective, about 4 in 10, were 'established' in their platform engineering efforts. Those that believed they were farthest in the journey, or 'advanced', represent just under 1 in 5 organizations (18%).
At the end of 2024, it shouldn’t be a surprise that 3 out of 5 of enterprises spinning up and managing cloud-native applications have ‘established’ or ‘advanced’ platform engineering practices. And even if they aren’t using the platform engineering label, they are using the technology, tools and practices to help their companies create market advantage using modern cloud technologies.
One might find it a little surprising that only 1 in 5 have ‘advanced’ platform engineering practices, but like all technologies and associated teams that manage them, it takes time and market momentum. In a few short years, most medium and large enterprises will have platform engineering practices in order to remain competitive. And, just as they feel that they've matured enough to have a winning modern application platform and ‘advanced’ platform engineering practice, the next technology cycle will already be upon them. Hello AI.
The next evolution of platform engineering will see extensive adoption of AI for automating infrastructure, analyzing telemetry data, providing intelligent visibility, automating CI/CD pipelines, and more, making platforms smarter and more resilient. And likely more complicated. Hello Platform Engineer.
For the full report, go to:
https://www.redhat.com/en/resources/state-of-platform-engineering-age-of-ai
