From the report “Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2023: Platform Engineering,” Paul Delory and Oleksandr Matvitskyy, Gartner, Oct 2022.

• The authors don’t take a strong position here (?), but I think their vision of platform engineering sits above the infrastructure layer. See the diagram above, for example. The platform engineering group doesn’t mess with that stuff. This seems right to me.
• Everyone loves a Gartner prediction: “By 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams as internal providers of reusable services, components and tools for application delivery.”
• “Cost savings are unlikely. The platform should improve productivity, cycle time and speed to market, among other important metrics. Expect a good return on investment, but not less investment overall. Direct, cash-out-of-pocket savings are unlikely to materialize.”

This report is free to download, my work licensed it. If you’re reading this, you’ll find it useful, so you should go read it!

Securing Your Environment with Tools Before Rules

My colleague Bryan Ross talk about security in the whole cloud native world. There’s plenty go shift left, and something called “shield right.” Also, he concisely explains the value of having a container-native build service (here, the Tanzu Build Service) and how you can get developers securing their code (better) from the start with Accelerators (templates), and buildpacks.

I think buildpacks are one of the more impressive, under appreciated things from the Cloud Foundry community. The idea of, well, preventing developers from building their own containers is huge if you want control over security, governance, and even basic things like instrumentation and other production management concerns.

You may recall this Bryan from this excellent talk he gave about his experience running a platforms in large organizations. If you’re in this whole cloud thing, you should really watch it if you haven’t.