Platform engineering was supposed to save both Devs and Ops from the problems with DevOps. It was supposed to solve the challenges of too much cognitive load, too many repetitive operations tasks, and in general, too much monkey business that cuts into the business of creating value.
But the work of building an internal, self-service platform that lets developers build and deploy while operations engineers are freed from provisioning their infrastructure has proven to be tougher than advertised. And yet, the trend is not slowing down: According to Gartner, by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will have started a platform team or initiative.
So what comes next for platform engineering? In this episode of The New Stack Makers, two platform engineering experts — Mallory Haigh, principal platform advocate at Humanitec, and Nathen Harvey, DORA lead and developer advocate at Google — talked to me about where the movement stands now, and what’s over the horizon.
We also dug into the most recent surveys by DORA and Humanitec, previously reported on The New Stack, that covered platform engineering and developer productivity.
A current problem with platform engineering initiatives, said Haigh, is that too many organizations focus on how to build an internal development platform (IDP) without truly considering why they need one.
“This is something I see when I walk into a lot of orgs, and it’s that not all platforms are created equal,” said Haigh, who is also Humanitec’s head of customer success. “Not all platform engineering teams are created equal. We tend to see a little bit of that mentality that DevOps suffered from, which is, ‘Is this a thing I buy? Is this a team I hire? And then suddenly I have this amazing performance engineering organization.’ That’s really not the case.”
She advised the Makers audience, “10% of platform engineering is technical, 90% is cultural change. And that takes a lot of time, and it takes a lot of asking hard questions. It takes a lot of really introspective thinking about how things are done and why they are done that way.”
Here Come the AI Agents
The rise of agentic AI — AI-based applications that automate tasks — is likely to have an impact on the future of platform engineering, Haigh and Harvey agreed.
We may see the intersection of agentic AI and platform engineering having impact in a number of ways, Haigh suggested, “even if a lot of that comes down to enabling a platform to help support people developing an AI product. For instance, something like, ‘you need GPU orchestration.’ That’s a big deal. That’s really important, getting things out quickly, making changes fast.”
But it could also, she said, mean something like what Humanitec is currently experimenting with: integrating a platform orchestrator with AI tools. “It’s very exciting, because what it means is that it’s another abstraction layer, but it’s an abstraction layer that has a lot of power behind it, and it’s an abstraction layer that can enable a lot of different things to happen with a fairly complex dataset, or fairly complex landscape under the hood.”
How might this work? A future user, Haigh said, might be able to query their platform about something, “and it gives me an answer, or it performs a task for me based on what tools it has available to it.”
Harvey called the rise of generative and agentic AI “a really interesting moment,” and one that closely parallels the rise of platform engineering.
“Why do I use generative AI as a developer?” he asked. “It’s to take away the toil of some work from me and let the computers do the work that they’re really good at. That’s not dissimilar to what we’re trying to build out with our platforms.”
The AI boom also presents a crucial test for platform engineering teams. With the new AI-based technology arriving, he asked, “How does the platform support that?”
Like Haigh, Harvey believes that platform engineering is at least as much a cultural change as a technical one for organizations. “I’m a firm believer that your technologies and the tools that you have reinforce and amplify the culture that you have,” he said. “And the best way to change the culture in an organization is to change how people work.”
Check out the full episode to learn more about the future of platform engineering, including advice from Haigh and Harvey about measuring results and the wisdom of starting small with platform projects. You can also explore the platform engineering community at platformengineering.org and the Dora community at dora.community.
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