Platform Engineering: More Teams Now Running 3 or More IDPs

Seventy-eight percent of people surveyed in a new report by Puppet by Perforce said their organization has had a dedicated platform team for at least three years.

Apr 4th, 2024 6:57am by Lawrence E Hecht and Heather Joslyn

Featued image for: Platform Engineering: More Teams Now Running 3 or More IDPs

Image by Charles Forerunner on Unsplash.

Platform engineering has gained a firm foothold in organizations that have adopted the practice, with 78% having a dedicated platform teams for at least three years, according to a new report.

However, that doesn’t mean that those organizations are settling on a homogeneous set of tools. Three-quarters of survey participants said they use at least three IDPs, internal self-service platforms, within their organization. That figure is up from 59% who reported the same in the 2023 edition of the survey by Puppet by Perforce.

Sixty-five percent of survey participants also indicated that their organization considers the platform team important and that it will continue to receive investment this year.

The “2024 State of DevOps Report,” which focused on the evolution of platform engineering, surveyed 467 people in August and September of last year. Sixty-seven percent of respondents said they belong to a platform team, while the rest said they interact directly with their organization’s platform team.

Biggest Challenge: Understanding Developer Needs

True to the conventional wisdom — and other recent studies, such as one released in late 2023 by Port — improved developer productivity was cited as the key benefit of platform engineering.

But the report also indicated a widely shared challenge: 41% of survey participants said a greater understanding of the needs of internal users was the biggest problem or gap that platform engineering needs to solve.

The structure of platform teams was also examined by the report. Forty-four percent of teams are considered to be part of the organization’s engineering group. Thirty-five percent are part of operations, while 20% are viewed as a part of a product team.

Only 42% of teams are managed as a separate group within their larger department, with 57% being overseen as part of the larger engineering, operations or product team.

To learn more about platform engineering, download our ebook, “Platform Engineering: What You Need to Know Now.”

Lawrence has generated actionable insights and reports about enterprise IT B2B markets and technology policy issues for over 25 years. He regularly works with clients to develop and analyze studies about open source ecosystems. In addition to his consulting work,...