Accelerate Revenue Growth and Time to Market with Platform Engineering

With 62% of large organizations already using multi-cloud (Cloud Computing News), business leaders are looking for their next competitive advantage. Finding these next-gen business edges can be a real challenge, but some innovative organizations are discovering that time to market can be a big competitive lever. They are accelerating their development cycles by up to 70% and seizing opportunities to build new markets, establish new brands and capture market share. This Time To Market (TTM) advantage can apply to entire markets as well as any aspect of your product or service connected to the cloud.

Gaining these big advantages means solving some big challenges. In most cases, development cycles are expanding as software gets more complex. “It’s a study in entropy, and it is not getting any more simple,” said “DevOps for Dummies” author Emily Freeman (SiliconAngle). Factor in multi-cloud infrastructure factors such as different programming languages (C#, Python, Java, .NET, GO, YAML), policies and authentication, and the magnitude of these challenges becomes very real.

Underpinning these challenges are how organizations approach their software development lifecycle (SDLC), multi-cloud infrastructure, security policies and more. Collectively, these factors dramatically affect time to market and how companies handle all of the preceding laundry list of challenges around the complexity of cloud deployments. When organizations evolve their processes and business models toward faster, smarter, more streamlined release cycles, they gain TTM advantage and that profound business edge over competitors.

So, how are these organizations getting there?

More speed and scale with Platform Engineering

Platform Engineering is becoming a business essential for cloud-first companies: “The Platform engineering team typically sits between operations and more IT-centric folks and developers, and their goals are to be a center of excellence, establish best practices, put in place the systems that enable the organization to scale, and ultimately empower the rest of the organization to ship faster with confidence, compliance, cost control - all the things necessary for a modern enterprise to go to the cloud,” said Joe Duffy, CEO and Founder of Pulumi.

Good platform engineering is a method of handling all platform deployments, rollbacks, load balancing and operations in a consistent, centralized manner that is programmatic and can be controlled and directed by the engineering organization. A robust platform engineering solution helps the organization to solve its complex cloud issues, including those around deployment, testing, policy and security. Great platform engineering becomes a secret weapon that some cloud-first organizations are using to outmaneuver and disrupt their competitors.

When DevOps, infrastructure and product delivery teams are working together in one seamless platform - using their favorite languages across all their stacks, they’re faster, happier, and more productive, which means faster development cycles and faster TTM. They deliver new features, new services and new products more quickly than competitors, and adjust and make needed changes faster, adapting to market changes and conditions more quickly.

Aptos Labs is a blockchain and Web3 technology leader that’s leveraged this approach very well. “Switching to Pulumi for our IaC needs helped us massively accelerate development velocity, while upgrading the security, compliance, and cost control policies,” said Christian Thielemann, Software Engineer.

As more organizations recognize its business transformation value, platform engineering is becoming a strategic differentiator. For example 4IR, a technology provider for manufacturing and IOT industries, said, “[platform engineering] has emerged as a key element in our strategy, creating tangible value for us by reducing infrastructure deployment time, up-skilling our team, and accelerating our time to market.”

How Platform Engineering delivers business value

Platform engineering allows organizations to improve productivity by removing bottlenecks around configuring cloud architectures, provisioning, testing and deployment. It improves security and compliance by setting up guardrails to enforce policy and security, preventing costly issues that can significantly delay or stop product deployment. By automating these necessary parts of cloud deployment, and enabling control and the ability to deliver consistency and repeatability, platform engineering makes your platform team and development teams faster, more efficient and improves their ability to work together.

Platform engineering tools deliver the ability for your platform team to program and control all aspects of the platform on which your software will run. You can manage deployment, scaling, provisioning, testing and more using code that you control and can manage and improve. That means predictability and the ability to fine control all of your platforms. The better platform engineering tools work with a range of cloud platforms and can be integrated into your existing toolset very easily.

All of these specific advantages mean that platform engineering delivers profound improvements in deployment times, testing times and provisioning leading to reductions of 70% or more in time to market. Snowflake, one of the largest cloud data warehouses, used by a large percentage of the Fortune 500, saw an improvement in deployment time from one and a half weeks to less than a day.

Effectively, platform engineering does the following things to deliver faster time to market and faster revenue growth:

• Solves a whole set of TTM issues and problems
• Simultaneous benefits to DevOps, engineering and the business
• Faster development cycles
• Reduces cloud complexity and cost and inefficiency
• Better adherence to policy and security

Platform engineering results also vary widely by company due to multiple factors. While 75% of participants in a recent Gartner survey said their organizations had adopted platform engineering, only 44% had formalized their approach. Plus, some solutions are more agile and flexible than others. “When we did it with Terraform, it took two weeks to do [infrastructure deployments]. Now we do it in about three hours a day. So that’s how much of an improvement Pulumi gave us on our deployment time,” said Matt Stephenson, Senior Principal Software Engineer at Starburst Data.

To find out more about how platform engineering can help you, take a look at these case studies:

• Aptos Labs uses Pulumi to transform development, increasing velocity by up to 10X while improving security, compliance, and cost control.
• 4IR uses Pulumi to reduce infrastructure deployment times, up-skill its team, and accelerate time to market.
• Starburst Data uses Pulumi to reduce infrastructure deployments from 2 weeks to just 3 hours.

If you are ready to talk to an expert about how platform engineering can help your organization, click here.