With the widespread adoption of DevOps, platforms such as StackSpot are emerging as one of the biggest trends in software engineering. By providing common frameworks and components — in a unified environment — they promise to accelerate product delivery, enhance customer value, and optimize the developer experience.
Platform engineering offers several advantages over traditional software development, including faster route-to-market, enhanced security, and lower complexity. This creates a consistent approach to product development, allowing a greater alignment between technology and business goals.
Born out of the need to optimize cloud-native development, platforms provide the architecture, intuitive interfaces, AI tools, and pre-built components that save time and encourage creativity. This provides companies almost unlimited opportunities for adaptability, scalability, and innovation — connecting users, cultivating customer loyalty, and improving the developer experience.
Well-built platforms, such as StackSpot Enterprise Developer Platform (EDP), help your developers collaborate seamlessly and in a streamlined manner, providing a single source of truth for cutting-edge software development and best practices. In this article, we explore the rising popularity of platform engineering and how it helps your organization deliver better results faster and at a lower cost.
The Rising Trend of Platform Engineering
According to Gartner, 80% of software engineering organizations will have implemented platform engineering teams by 2026. This directly responds to DevOps teams seeking to improve visibility, resilience, security, and developer experience across the product development lifecycle.
This is also fueled by rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs), making it easier for development teams to unlock the benefits of integrated development practices. Platform engineering is, in fact, a multidisciplinary approach that incorporates the best of agile development practices, seamlessly integrating the development lifecycle from conception to support.
With only 12.5% to 30% of developers’ coding time, platform engineering is gaining real traction in IT organizations for its ability to establish best practices and significantly improve the developer experience (DevEx). It helps:
- Expedite product delivery through reusable tools and services.
- Connect systems by providing an integrated framework for cohesive application development.
- Optimize resources by streamlining resource utilization and enhancing scalability.
- Improve agility by promoting rapid application development.
- Enhance customer and developer experience with flexible tools that promote personalized interactions and increased loyalty.
- Minimize risk by standardizing processes and policies.
Implementing a Platform as a Product Approach
Platforms promise to address some of the biggest challenges facing organizations in the cloud-native era: the increasing complexity of tools that hinder developer self-service and creativity. An Internal Developer Platform (IDP) helps meet this challenge.
Such a platform describes tools and workflows that foster self-service capabilities in cloud-native environments, seamlessly integrating end-to-end product development.
The most successful teams approach their IDP as they would any other product. Thus, the platform team builds a product developers want to use, enhancing the value the organization delivers. The core operating principles of a successful Platform-as-a-Product include:
- Interoperability: Platforms should facilitate the seamless integration of tools, technologies, and services.
- Scalability: Platforms should scale and grow with demand.
- Agility: Platforms should adapt quickly to changing requirements.
- Automation: Platforms should enable the automation of repetitive tasks.
- Golden Pathways: Optimized development pathways should be available as standard.
- Self-Service: Developers should be able to access the resources they need when they need them.
- Security: Data, applications, and infrastructure security should always be a primary consideration.
Creating your own platform from scratch is challenging and risky, as it involves a dedicated team with a Platform-as-a-Product mindset. However, StackSpot can help alleviate these challenges by offering an Enterprise Developer Platform – ready for your team to start to use – that maximizes efficiency and turns your context into a competitive advantage.
The Role of AI in Platform Engineering
Platform engineering builds on DevOps, which moves software development out of silos and provides engineering teams with a bird’s eye view of the software development process. This promotes self-service so developers can produce and deploy code faster and more securely.
This also represents a cultural shift that addresses the challenges of rapid development. Platform engineering drastically reduces the complexity of software development, noticeably enhancing the developer experience for better quality outcomes.
Automation and artificial intelligence are crucial, helping developers build, test, and deploy faster, reducing errors and streamlining workflows. Up to 43% of early adopters of platform engineering report an improvement in product delivery.
Organizations can also leverage Machine Learning (ML) models for automated troubleshooting, which analyzes historical data to identify issues and minimize downtime proactively. They can also use these models to optimize performance, which offers suggestions to improve resource utilization and the user experience.
Furthermore, AI-powered tools can generate optimized code, reducing development time, cognitive load, and human error. ML models can also provide suggestions for automated testing and security. As artificial intelligence handles more routine, manual tasks, developers feel less overwhelmed and can better focus on higher-value, creative work.
Accelerate Development with StackSpot
At StackSpot, platforms form the cornerstone of software innovation, providing cutting-edge tools and methodologies to seamlessly deploy and scale leading-edge applications, delivering best-in-class software development methodologies.
StackSpot Enterprise Developer Platform (EDP) empowers your developers with optimized deployment pipelines, monitoring dashboards, logging solutions, and more, freeing your teams to focus on delivering value. By automating deployments, provisioning, and scaling, StackSpot EDP reduces cognitive load, mitigates risk, and accelerates time-to-market.
StackSpot AI, our contextual AI code assistant, provides further enhancements by leveraging your own knowledge bases and outcomes to generate high-quality coding suggestions.
StackSpot Cloud Services completes our offering with an end-to-end cloud ecosystem, 400+ security guardrails, FinOps recommendations and best practices, and more.
Try out StackSpot’s Enterprise Developer Platform
Platform engineering requires complete dedication to a culture of collaboration empowered by top-down strategic decision-making. It makes building a bridge between development and operations possible by enabling integrated development and collaborative engineering.
It’s not a replacement for DevOps. Instead, it builds on DevOps to empower developers with self-service, enhanced collaboration, and accelerated deployment.
Why not try StackSpot EDP, which is explicitly tailored to your organization’s unique needs and challenges? We aim to show how StackSpot streamlines the application of guidelines, saving you time and boosting your team’s productivity. Schedule a demo today!
