Platform Engineering Impact on Developer Productivity: Dora Report 2024; Trends and Takeaways
7 min read
Table of Contents
- What is Platform Engineering?
- The Rise of Platform Engineering
- The Good: Platform Engineering as a Productivity Power-Up
- Case in Point:
- The Bad: Productivity vs. Stability
- 1. The Platform Paradox: Improved Coordination, Increased Delays
- 2. Throughput Trade-offs: Gains vs. Friction
- 3. Stability Challenges: A Double-Edged Sword
- 4. Burnout Risks and Platform-Induced Stress
- The Fix: Platform Engineering Done Right
- The Bigger Picture: Why Platform Engineering Matters
- The Road Ahead: Trends to Watch for in 2025
- Closing Thoughts
- FAQs
Picture this: your dev team is cruising through code sprints, but every now and then, it feels like someone threw a wrench into the engine. Deployments stall, configurations clash, and the debug backlog grows longer. Now here’s where platform engineering comes into play and the 2024 Dora Report has some interesting insights about platform engineering and its benefits in the world of software delivery process.
What is Platform Engineering?
Platform engineering is a discipline within software development and IT operations focused on building and maintaining an internal platform to streamline the work of developers. Think of it as creating a "developer-friendly playground" where tools, services, and workflows are standardized, automated, and optimized for efficiency.
In simple terms, platform engineering builds the foundation that developers rely on to write, test, and deploy code without getting bogged down by repetitive tasks or complex configurations. It’s the backstage crew making sure everything runs smoothly so developers can focus on the actual show—writing great code.
The Rise of Platform Engineering
In 2024, platform engineering isn't just a buzzword. It’s the unsung hero (or occasional villain) reshaping how developers work. The latest 2024 Dora report highlights that platform engineering is more than a trend—it’s a transformative force.
But like any superhero power, it comes with trade-offs. While internal developer platforms (IDPs) promise seamless workflows and faster deployments, the path isn’t always smooth.
The Good: Platform Engineering as a Productivity Power-Up
Let’s start with the wins: platform engineering is like the ultimate backstage crew for developers, ensuring everything runs smoothly so they can focus on the main act—building cool stuff. By empowering developers with self-service capabilities, platform engineering eliminates the frustrating back-and-forth with ops teams.
Need a test environment?
Spin it up yourself. Want to push a change? Do it with a few clicks. Add automation into the mix, and repetitive, time-sucking tasks like manual testing or deployment setup become a thing of the past.
The result?
Developers spend less time wrestling with tools and processes and more time creating. Unsurprisingly, the numbers paint a glowing picture. Don’t believe me. Find it for yourself:
8% higher individual developer productivity
6% boost in overall software delivery
Case in Point:
One prominent example of platform engineering in action is at Spotify, where the engineering team relies heavily on their internal platform, known as Backstage. Originally developed to address the complexities faced by their developers, Backstage has become central to Spotify’s engineering operations.
Backstage provides a central hub for Spotify engineers, enabling them to discover services, deploy code, and manage their applications with minimal friction. It simplifies workflows by integrating numerous tools into one interface, allowing engineers to access everything they need in one place. This approach has improved productivity at Spotify by reducing time spent on setup, eliminating repetitive tasks, and minimizing handoff delays.
The Bad: Productivity vs. Stability
On the downside, teams that rely heavily on a platform experienced an 8% drop in throughput compared to those not using one. This could be due to the additional steps each change undergoes, like testing and security checks, before deployment, which slow down the overall process.
Alternatively, it could indicate that the platform isn't improving quality, or that teams aren’t fully utilizing its features, like automated testing.
1. The Platform Paradox: Improved Coordination, Increased Delays
Internal developer platforms often involve multiple handoffs for testing, security, deployment, and monitoring. While these processes aim to improve quality and streamline coordination, they can inadvertently introduce delays, impacting overall efficiency.
2. Throughput Trade-offs: Gains vs. Friction
Teams relying entirely on the platform throughout the application lifecycle experienced a 6% reduction in throughput. This points to a balance between platform-induced consistency and the friction caused when the platform isn't perfectly aligned with team needs.
3. Stability Challenges: A Double-Edged Sword
A 14% drop in stability for changes made through the platform highlights a nuanced picture. While platforms boost developer confidence for experimentation and rapid iteration, they also lead to more rework and higher failure rates, which can strain teams.
4. Burnout Risks and Platform-Induced Stress
The increased rate of rework and failure, tied to platform-related instability, correlates with higher burnout among developers. This suggests that the benefits of experimentation must be balanced against the stress caused by frequent issues in deployments.
Why the dip?
Handoffs galore: Each line of code passes through multiple layers of testing, security, and deployment. Necessary? Yes. But it’s also time-consuming.
Experimentation overload: Faster iteration often leads to more failures, and that’s burning out developers.
Nathan Harvey, Dora Lead and Developer Advocate at Google Cloud states, "Platform engineering isn’t about quick fixes; it’s about building systems that let developers thrive. That takes time, iteration, and empathy for the user experience—your devs."
Also read: The 2024 Dora Report: State of DevOps Breakdown Summary
The Fix: Platform Engineering Done Right
To harness platform engineering’s potential while avoiding its pitfalls, teams need to rethink how they approach it.
Treat the Platform as a Product: Developers are your end-users. Gather their feedback and iterate to ensure the platform is helping, not hindering.
Balance Autonomy with Accountability: Self-service is great, but bake in best practices like automated testing and robust QA to avoid the “move fast, break everything” trap.
Make It a Journey:
Perfection won’t happen overnight. Embrace hiccups, learn from failures, and focus on continuous improvement.
The Bigger Picture: Why Platform Engineering Matters
The Dora report also paints a tantalizing picture of what’s next:
60% increase in deployment frequency for teams leveraging platform engineering.
35% improvement in lead time from commit to deployment, keeping teams agile in competitive industries like FinTech and HealthTech.
25% fewer failures in changes, meaning happier, less-stressed developers.
The Road Ahead: Trends to Watch for in 2025
As platform engineering evolves, here’s what’s on the horizon:
AI-Powered Platforms: Imagine platforms that predict issues or auto-configure environments for you.
Security Automation: Integrated security checks will become a seamless part of pipelines.
Real-Time Analytics: Platforms will provide data-driven insights on workflows, helping teams continuously optimize.
Closing Thoughts
Platform engineering isn’t a magic wand—it’s a tool. Done right, it boosts productivity, reduces stress, and creates happier teams. But as the 2024 Dora report reminds us, success lies in balance: empowering developers while maintaining stability.
By 2026, Gartner estimates 80% of large software engineering organizations will adopt platform teams to enhance CI/CD pipelines, increase security, and automate operations, further highlighting the transformative impact of this approach.
So, whether you’re a platform enthusiast or a skeptic, one thing’s clear: the future of developer productivity is here, and it’s built on strong platforms.
FAQs
1. What does it mean by platform engineering?
Platform engineering is the discipline of designing and building internal developer platforms (IDPs) to streamline and automate the software development lifecycle. It focuses on creating reusable, scalable systems that provide developers with self-service capabilities for deployment, testing, and monitoring. By reducing dependency on operations teams, platform engineering enables faster delivery, better quality, and reduced developer frustration.
2. Is platform engineering the same as DevOps?
No, platform engineering and DevOps are related but distinct. While DevOps emphasizes the collaboration between development and operations teams to improve software delivery processes, platform engineering focuses on creating a dedicated platform to achieve these goals. A platform engineer develops the tools and infrastructure that make DevOps practices more efficient, offering a more productized approach to DevOps initiatives.
3. What is the difference between a platform engineer and a software engineer?
A software engineer focuses on building applications and features for end users, while a platform engineer creates the infrastructure, tools, and frameworks that support the software engineering process. Platform engineers enable software engineers to work more efficiently by providing automated systems for deployment, testing, and scaling, among other tasks. In essence, platform engineers work behind the scenes to empower software engineers.