What the 2024 DORA State of DevOps Report Doesn’t Tell You: The Platform Engineering Force Multiplier

The 2024 DORA State of DevOps Report is an invaluable resource for many technology leaders striving to enhance software delivery performance. It provides key insights into metrics such as deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and recovery time—metrics that reflect the efficiency and stability of engineering teams. But what if there's more to the story? Beyond these key metrics lies a deeper layer of practice and strategy that many elite performers leverage: the platform engineering force multiplier.

This article explores how four critical elements—DevOps practices and principles, team topology patterns, cloud-native technologies, and an underlying generative culture—act as a force multiplier for high-performance teams. These elements, inspired by the DevOps Handbook, Team Topologies, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) principles, and Dr. Ron Westrum’s cultural framework, complement the findings of the DORA report, helping engineering teams not only achieve elite status but sustain it.

This article is based on my experience with advisory clients and the works of great thinkers I follow, including Gene Kim , Ron Westrum , Matthew Skelton , Manuel Pais (Team Topologies) ???? ???? , and countless Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project and members.

1. DevOps Practices and Principles: The Engine for Flow and Stability

At the core of every high-performing engineering team are the DevOps practices and principles that enable efficient, predictable, and high-quality software delivery. As outlined in the DevOps Handbook, the principles of flow, feedback, and continuous learning create an environment where teams can move quickly while maintaining quality. These principles are embodied in practices like continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), and automation using pipelines and Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

The DORA report highlights that elite teams excel across all four key metrics—deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to recover, and change failure rate. To achieve this level of performance, DevOps practices are essential. Automation, IaC, and feedback loops minimize manual processes, reduce errors, and accelerate the delivery pipeline, directly contributing to these metrics.

Force Multiplier Effect:

• DevOps practices provide the foundational engine for rapid, stable software delivery.
• Automation practices using declarative technologies for IaC (e.g., Terraform/OpenTofu and Kubernetes) ensure infrastructure consistency, making deployments repeatable and predictable.
• Continuous learning and feedback enable teams to improve iteratively, fostering resilience and adaptability.

DORA provides a quantitative view of software performance, but adopting DevOps principles as described in the DevOps Handbook is how elite performers maintain this performance consistently. The force multiplier of DevOps practices is the bedrock of achieving—and sustaining—elite performance.

2. Team Topology Patterns: Structuring for Success

High performance isn't just about tools and processes—it's also about how teams are structured to work effectively. The Team Topologies framework provides a blueprint for organizing teams in a way that minimizes cognitive load, reduces friction, and promotes efficiency. The DORA report underscores the importance of cross-functional collaboration and alignment, which aligns directly with the stream-aligned, platform, and enablement team patterns described by Team Topologies.

Force Multiplier Effect:

• Platform Teams: These teams create reusable capabilities that are leveraged by stream-aligned teams, providing the infrastructure and tools necessary to accelerate delivery without each team having to build everything from scratch.
• Stream-Aligned Teams: Focused on delivering customer value, these teams benefit from the self-service capabilities provided by platform teams, enabling them to work autonomously and deliver faster.
• Enablement Teams: These teams support other teams in adopting best practices, new technologies, and overcoming complex challenges.
• Platform as a Product drives a focus on the internal developer experience with the developers as an internal customer. Each product cycle begins in deep collaboration with platform engineers and possibly enablement team members embedded within a stream-aligned team. This best practice of creating a thinnest viable platform alongside your developer-customer is the polar opposite of a "build it and they will come" approach.

By adopting team topology patterns, organizations can ensure that every team—whether it's building customer-facing features or maintaining internal platforms—can focus on its core mission without being bogged down by unnecessary complexity. This structural approach aligns perfectly with DORA's findings that high-performing teams often have clear ownership, effective cross-team collaboration, and reduced friction in their workflows.

3. Cloud-Native Technology: Enabling Scalability and Reliability

The DORA report emphasizes the significance of flexible, scalable infrastructure for elite performance. Cloud-native technologies form the backbone of this flexibility, enabling organizations to build and operate scalable applications in dynamic environments like public, private, or hybrid clouds. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) defines cloud-native technologies as those that empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments.

Force Multiplier Effect:

• Cloud-native tools such as Kubernetes for orchestration, serverless platforms, and declarative infrastructure management (e.g., Terraform) abstract away much of the complexity involved in scaling applications.
• These tools support continuous deployment and autoscaling, ensuring that infrastructure can keep pace with development without manual intervention.
• To reap the benefits of cloud infrastructure, organizations must embrace the flexibility and scalability that cloud-native practices enable. Failing to transform processes and workflows can result in outcomes that are no better than, or even worse than, staying in the data center. Don't pave the cow path with lift & shift thinking!

The DORA report makes it clear that simply adopting the cloud isn’t enough—cloud-native technology and practices are essential to realizing the full benefits of cloud infrastructure. By focusing on transformation, flexibility, and the adoption of modern tools and workflows, organizations can move beyond traditional data center limitations and achieve the performance improvements that define elite teams. Furthermore, by leveraging cloud-native technologies, elite teams are able to maintain high deployment frequency and quick recovery times without sacrificing system stability—a core insight of the DORA report. Cloud-native practices operationalize these insights, allowing organizations to meet their performance goals with agility and resilience.

4. Generative Culture: The Foundation of Innovation and Trust

The final, and perhaps most critical, force multiplier is culture. Dr. Ron Westrum's index of organizational cultures identifies generative cultures as those that are high-trust, performance-oriented, and collaborative. These characteristics align closely with the cultural insights from the DORA report, which emphasize that elite performance is often driven by transformational leadership, psychological safety, and a commitment to learning.

Force Multiplier Effect:

• A generative culture empowers teams to take risks, learn from failures, and continuously improve. It encourages experimentation and ensures that individuals feel safe to contribute ideas and innovations without fear of blame.
• High-trust environments foster rapid information flow and collaboration, which directly impacts team effectiveness and software delivery outcomes.

The DORA report highlights the importance of leadership, stable priorities, and reducing burnout as key factors in achieving high performance. A generative culture underpins all these aspects, ensuring that the organization is resilient and adaptable in the face of change. Without a strong cultural foundation, even the best tools and practices will fall short of their potential.

Bringing It All Together: The Platform Engineering Force Multiplier

The 2024 DORA State of DevOps Report provides a roadmap for measuring and improving software delivery performance. However, the platform engineering force multiplier goes beyond metrics to focus on how elite teams operate at scale. By combining DevOps practices, team topology patterns, cloud-native technologies, and a generative culture, organizations can create a powerful synergy that accelerates delivery, enhances reliability, and fosters innovation.

These four elements aren’t just isolated practices—they reinforce one another to create an ecosystem where high performance is the norm. DevOps practices and cloud-native tools provide the technical backbone, team topologies structure teams for maximum effectiveness, and a generative culture ensures that everyone is aligned, motivated, and empowered to innovate.

For organizations looking to become elite performers, it’s not enough to focus on metrics alone. The real key lies in creating an environment where people, processes, and technologies come together seamlessly to multiply each other’s impact. This is the platform engineering force multiplier—and it’s what takes high-performing teams from good to truly great.

Mark Panthofer is passionate about helping teams reach their full potential through smart platform engineering and DevOps practices. As VP of DevOps and Cloud at nvisia, he works hands-on with organizations to implement tools like Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for Hub & Spoke Architectures, streamline release workflows, and build strong, collaborative cultures. Mark’s focus on cloud-native technologies and team topologies aligns with the DORA State of DevOps principles, making him a go-to resource for teams looking to boost performance and embrace innovation.