The belief that shared service platforms are too restrictive and inflexible may be the biggest challenge facing platform teams, according to a report released Tuesday.

This perception has increased with the increased adoption of shared service platforms, says the Rafay Systems study. While only 28% of respondents said this was a challenge last year, it is the biggest challenge platform teams will face next year, with 44% of respondents saying it.

The study also showed that platform engineering is widely used, with 71 percent of survey respondents saying their organization has a platform engineering team, while another 20 percent have an unofficial group that acts as a central platform team.

According to the report, platform teams expect significant growth. Sixty-nine percent of companies with platform teams expect their platform development headcount to grow by 25 percent or more in the next year. Almost as many (65 percent) expect their platform budget to grow by at least 25 percent in the next year. However, only 47 percent of platform teams have a separate budget from their IT budget.

It is important to note that, due to the study’s sample, platform teams are likely to be more widely represented among survey respondents than among companies worldwide.

Study participants were recruited through a third-party panel provider. All work in the US for a company with at least 1,000 employees and have experience with Kubernetes. Fifty-two percent had roles that were primarily IT/cloud-related, 15 percent focused on platforms, and the rest had roles in development, DevOps, and site reliability engineering (SRE).

The report did not specify which budgets, teams or positions will be negatively impacted by the trends in platform engineering. For example, will cloud and DevOps teams lose staff as more employees move to platform teams?

Platform Team Challenges

Platform teams themselves face a number of challenges. 43% of respondents reported difficulties with compatibility and integration with existing tools and workflows. In addition, 39% said their company’s platform team faces the complexity of deploying and managing multicloud environments.

Beyond operational concerns, perceptions and potentially misunderstandings about platform development continue to pose obstacles for platform teams.

41 percent of respondents said platform teams face the challenge that many other teams still prefer to build and manage their own services or tools. Not surprisingly, 31 percent believe platform teams face the challenge because they are unaware or don’t understand the benefits of a shared services platform.

However, there appears to be a growing acceptance of the need for platform teams. Looking at potential challenges in the coming year, fewer companies believe these will include a preference for building independent services (35%) or a lack of awareness of shared platforms (26%).

Source: “The Pulse of Enterprise Platform Teams: Cloud, Kubernetes and AI” by Rafay Systems

What slows down the provisioning of environments?

Multicloud and environment deployment are unique concepts. Multicloud deployment is about managing resources and user accounts across multiple clouds to improve scalability and flexibility, whereas environment deployment is about setting up and managing a single cloud environment to support application deployment.

Half of respondents said their organization has a platform team working on an initiative to deploy and manage multicloud and hybrid cloud environments. And as mentioned, managing multicloud environments can be complex.

When asked about their developer and automation efforts, 28% said their company has an initiative to automate the provisioning and management of environments. That’s less than the 40% that are building internal developer platforms and 45% that are focused on providing self-service experiences for developers.

Of the 28% reporting initiatives to deploy and manage environments, Rafay found:

• 82% said it takes at least a month to get a cloud application/service into production after the code is finalized and quality checked. This is much slower than desired, as 80% believe it should take less than a week from final code to deployment.
• When asked what causes delays in moving finished code to production, 61% cited endless bug fix cycles at the infrastructure level, 56% cited the complexity of deploying and managing environments, and 46% cited back and forth between application and infrastructure teams about infrastructure requirements.
• Further down the list of delays were waiting for someone to provision or boot up environments (43%) and burdensome provisioning ticketing systems (26%).

Source: “The Pulse of Enterprise Platform Teams: Cloud, Kubernetes and AI” by Rafay Systems

Self-service for developers

44% of respondents plan to prioritize developer self-service in the next year. Among those focused on self-service, the report found:

• 65% want to enable self-service workflows for deploying Kubernetes clusters.
• 60% want to enable self-service monitoring for applications (60%) and infrastructure (51%).
• 47% prioritize namespace as a service (47%) and self-service for provisioning environments (43%).

Lawrence has been producing actionable insights and reports on B2B enterprise IT markets and technology policy issues for nearly 25 years. He regularly works with clients to develop and analyze studies on open source ecosystems. In addition to his consulting work…

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