2023 Platform Engineering Predictions

As we are closing curtains on the year 2022, we wanted to look back at our business, and customer discussions this year and extrapolate to predict 2023 for industry trends, evolving technologies and where customers possibly invest their time and energy.

In general, as the cloud-based infrastructure grows, organizations will invest more on platforms where the demand is driven by scalable, flexible, and cost-effective solutions that can support modern application development and deployment needs

Increase the Developer’s Productivity.

With the recession around the corner, organizations apart from other cost-saving measures, want to increase developer's productivity by 20-25% with the current strength they already have. In order to achieve this, we are observing a movement towards having systems, processes and efficiency to increase developer productivity. This can be achieved using a self-service model, smartly configured tool sets, using AI schemes such as MSFTs Co-pilot etc.

Citizen’s Developer.??

There is increasing awareness among organizations that developers should be only focussed on writing code for their business features that are scalable, extensible and performant while not bothering about how their software is deployed, when are they deployed, which platform are they getting deployed etc. This model is already part of hyper-scalers which we see flowing to other organizations as well. This model helps in 3 aspects

• Skills sets required for hiring developers are a lot less and therefore costs less.
• Business does not get affected much when an engineer leaves the organization.
• Less friction between the cloud and software team.

Architecture-as-a-Code

There is more need than before as to how one architect’s a solution or specific component for the business need. For example, the messaging system Kafka can configure in many ways accordingly to business needs such as?

• The finance business requires reliability, ordering, and no duplication.?
• Social media requires availability while ordering may not matter much.
• Metrics collection systems will be more interested in the latest data while not bothered about duplication or order etc.

All these require a deep understanding of the systems and architecture where organizations may be lacking. So, having this architecture inform of templates and that can be created in a repeated fashion is something that will get popular.

Commoditization of Internal Developers Platform(IDP) & Automation

All big organizations have internal developers platforms to improve their efficiency which are not available to even fortune 500s, so there will be a lot of efforts towards building IDP using extreme automation. While this may sound relatively easy to build but organizations have often failed to build one. There are vendors like us (Tailwinds Major) who are solving this complex problem for both big organizations and making it a commodity by providing a flavor for the small and mid-markets.

Increased Focus on Security??

With the growing number of cyber threats and data breaches, platform engineers will need to prioritize security and compliance in their design and development processes. This includes implementing robust authentication and access control measures, as well as ensuring that data is properly protected and encrypted.

FinOps???

We are also observing where finops is moving from saving just costs to budget setting, cost estimates for specific configuration/deployment/teams, report and alerting when the actual overruns expected budget. While all these will take time, these aspects will gain momentum in 2023.

In summary, 2023 is shaping up to be an exciting year for platform engineering, with a focus on automation, process and efficiency using workflows for platform engineering. As these technologies continue to evolve and mature, platform engineers will need to stay up-to-date and adapt their skills and practices to meet the changing needs of their organizations and customers. We have intentionally stayed away from specifying AI as each component has its own AI solutions to it.

Hope you enjoyed reading this article. Please do leave a comment.

We are signing off this year and hope to see you all next year.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!

Tailwinds MajorDomo is a Smart Developers Tool using Platform engineering concepts. To know more about MajorDomo reach us at [email protected]