More and more groups have made platform teams to help make things better for developers – and the newest State of DevOps Report from Puppet is showing how platform engineering is making security better too.
The 13th yearly State of DevOps Report – also called the State of Platform Engineering Report by Puppet – asked around 500 people, mostly from IT, about their thoughts and experiences with platform engineering.
Platform engineering is becoming a popular term for how developer teams work. Simply put, it’s about creating a single, main place for DevOps tools. This helps developers use tools without needing to know them deeply, making it easier to handle all the software that DevOps teams use.
One clear explanation from a DevOpsDays London talk is from Abby Bangser of Syntasso. Platform engineering brings DevOps principles to a large scale; and one important principle of DevOps – working together – is hard to do when things get bigger.
Different people might define it differently, but Puppet explains its version in a blog post. They say that DevOps makes developers learn a lot about a tool just to use it right. But that’s not the main thing they should be doing. Platform engineering helps manage that by giving developers organized tools and ways of working together. This helps teams avoid confusion and delays in development.
The report found that security is a big part of platform engineering. Nearly half (43%) said their platform has a special team for security, and over half (51%) said platform teams make sure everyone is using safe software and tools. Most also agreed that platform teams help with following rules.
The main benefits of platform engineering from a development point of view are clear in the report. Developers say it helps them work faster, make better software, and deploy it quicker. Two thirds (65%) said the platform team will keep getting support.
For what’s next, a similar number (66%) say making things automatic is a priority for platform teams. This makes sense, since making things automatic and having standard ways of doing things are seen as important goals for platform engineering.
Security is the big point of this report. “Platform engineering is making security a big part of platforms right from the start,” said Kapil Tandon, VP of product management at Puppet by Perforce. “Security is important for everyone, and it’s good to see platform engineering playing a big role in it.”