In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, survival and growth depend on bringing new products and features to market quickly. The pace at which an organization can innovate and deliver new value to customers directly impacts its market position, customer satisfaction, and overall success. Fast product development enables businesses to respond to changing market demands, capitalize on new opportunities, and stay ahead of the competition.

The need for speed has led organizations to seek innovative approaches to software development and operational efficiency. Enter platform engineering—a paradigm shift that promises to turbocharge the development life cycle.

Platform engineering supports and accelerates the creative processes of building, deploying, and managing applications. By abstracting the complexity of underlying infrastructure and providing developers with self-service capabilities, platform engineering enables teams to focus on what they do best: creating value through software.

This article explores the multifaceted role of platform engineering in enabling faster product and feature development and boosting productivity. Through a comprehensive analysis of its benefits, real-world applications, and implementation strategies, we explain how platform engineering can be a game changer for organizations striving to stay ahead in a competitive market.

As we delve into the intricacies of platform engineering, we invite you to consider its potential to transform your own product development journey. The promise of fast, efficient innovation awaits.

Platform engineering is a strategic approach to software development and operations, focusing on building and maintaining a robust, scalable, and efficient platform that developers use to deploy and manage applications. This discipline bridges the gap between traditional IT operations and software development, ensuring that infrastructure is not just a backdrop for development, but an active enabler of innovation and speed.

Platform engineering encompasses several components, each designed to enhance the development life cycle (see figure 1):

‒ Self-service portals and tools. These allow developers to access infrastructure resources, environments, and deployment tools without waiting for manual support, significantly reducing the time from development to deployment.

‒ Automation and CI/CD pipelines. Automating testing, integration, and deployment processes ensures that software can be released reliably and quickly, with minimal human error.

‒ Monitoring and observability. Integrated tools for monitoring and observability enable teams to track the performance of applications and infrastructure in real time, facilitating proactive management and troubleshooting.

‒ Security and compliance. Embedding security practices and compliance checks into the development pipeline ensures that applications are secure by design, addressing potential vulnerabilities early in the development process.

Embracing platform engineering can unlock new levels of efficiency, agility, and innovation, paving the way for faster and more reliable product development. Along with accelerating the development process, it enhances the overall quality of the products.

Below are the main benefits of adopting platform engineering (see figure 2):

Faster time to market. One of the most significant advantages of platform engineering is its ability to streamline development workflows. Sixty-eight percent of practitioners report an increase in development velocity. By abstracting the complexities of the underlying infrastructure, platform engineering gives developers a simplified and consistent environment for application development and deployment. This abstraction allows for the automation of repetitive tasks, such as provisioning, scaling, and management of infrastructure, which in turn reduces the time required to take a product from conception to market. The efficiency gained through these streamlined processes enables organizations to rapidly iterate on product features, respond to customer feedback, and adapt to market changes, thus achieving a faster time to market.

Improved developer experience. Platform engineering improves the developer experience by reducing the cognitive load associated with managing infrastructure and operational concerns. With access to self-service tools and automated pipelines, developers can focus more on coding and less on the operational aspects of application deployment. This empowerment can improve productivity and boost morale, as developers can see their contributions move swiftly from development to production. Moreover, a positive developer experience can attract and retain top talent, enhancing an organization’s development capabilities. Some 58 percent of software engineering leaders report that developer experience is “very” or “extremely” critical to the C-suite at their organizations.

Increased operational efficiency. Through standardization and automation, platform engineering reduces operational overhead. Standardized environments and processes ensure that applications are developed, tested, and deployed in a consistent manner, minimizing the chances of errors and discrepancies. Automating routine tasks frees up valuable human resources to focus on more strategic activities. The majority (59 percent) of practitioners report that platform engineering improves their operational efficiency.

Enhanced scalability and reliability. Platform engineering plays a crucial role in building scalable and resilient systems. By providing tools and frameworks for managing infrastructure as code, platform engineering enables organizations to easily scale their applications in response to varying loads. Additionally, the focus on automation and standardization ensures that systems are more resilient to failures, with mechanisms in place for automatic recovery and redundancy. This resilience is vital for maintaining high availability and ensuring a consistent user experience, regardless of the scale at which an application operates. About 60 percent of platform engineering practitioners report an improvement in the reliability in their systems.

In summary, platform engineering offers a comprehensive suite of benefits that collectively speed up the time to market, improve the developer experience, increase operational efficiency, and enhance the scalability and reliability of systems. These advantages make platform engineering indispensable for organizations aiming to be competitive in digital innovation.

For your IT organization, platform engineering can provide a foundation that can make your developer teams more productive while keeping them happy and focused on delivering business value. It can reduce your time to market and ensure reliable and secure delivery of high-quality software. At the same time, well-designed and well-integrated tooling and enablement will help you reduce repetitive tasks and streamline your development process.

If you are struggling to build new software quickly enough, assess your current development processes and consider integrating platform engineering practices.