Trends and Leaders in Platform Engineering and IaC

It’s a first! After publishing a successful series of reports which helped break down emerging markets in multicloud infrastructure, AI infrastructure, SASE, cloud security, cloud cost management, and cloud AIOps, Futuriom has launched our first report on platform engineering and infrastructure as code (IaC). Our expectation is that this will follow in the footsteps of our successful cloud security, SASE, and multicloud reports, which have been growing over multiple years of gathering information on the direction of markets.

Futuriom’s research with end users shows they need better tools to manage the growing complexity of IT environments—including both cloud-native and traditional enterprise, as well as public and private cloud. They are also struggling to integrate environments to provide their staff with effective automation tools to manage development and infrastructure and improve management goals such as observability and compliance.

This report focuses on how the technologies that comprise platform engineering, IaC, and IDPs are being integrated to provide a more robust management and orchestration system for hybrid environments. After spending months talking to end users, investigating public research, and getting briefed about the platform engineering environment, it’s clear that the trend is gathering momentum, but it’s still early days and it will require more work before these markets accelerate.

Value of Platform Engineering and IaC

The value of both platform engineering and IaC is already clear in the market. We view platform engineering as another level of abstraction of cloud management that can help cloud architects securely manage applications and infrastructure across diverse environments. Some of the problems these technologies can solve include:

Enabling better organizational collaboration and visibility of technology apps and infrastructure.
Acceleration of product and service delivery.
Improved organizational system controls, such as compliance and security.

In this report we’ll dive into some definitions of platform engineering, IaC, and products such as IDPs, which are all part of the platform engineering movement. We’ll talk about the changing technical landscape, the challenges that users are having managing their applications and infrastructure, and finally, some of the potential solutions and leaders we have studied so far.

Key Highlights

This report includes and overview of the key drivers of the market, the major customer considerations, and key vendors emerging in this new market.

A few of the highlights covered include:

Platform engineering is a growing movement to build a management layer that can unify automation of app deployment with infrastructure, bringing better efficiency, compliance, and security to an organization’s IT assets. Our research across several vectors of vendor and user feedback indicates this market is growing in importance.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a set of automation and orchestration tools that are crucial to platform engineering. IaC can be linked with DevOps platforms such as internal developer platforms (IDPs) as well as platform engineering to deliver better automation of infrastructure in cloud environments.
Introducing platform engineering and IaC can deliver real benefits in productivity. Recent survey data from a DORA report as well as Puppet indicate users see productivity gains with a platform approach.
Demand for data fueling AI apps is increasing the need for full platform visibility. The arrival of Gen AI and other flavors of enterprise AI will increase demand for cloud automation and platform engineering.
Futuriom research shows that multicloud and hybrid cloud architectures are gaining favor, which should drive further need for platform engineering and IaC approaches. Of 131 pros surveyed, 70% said they have plans for hybrid deployments.
Companies mentioned in this report: Amazon, Atlassian, Aviatrix, Cortex, Google, HashiCorp, Humanitec, Microsoft, Pulumi, Spacelift, System Initiative, VMware (Tanzu)

Special thanks to sponsors Pulumi and Spacelift!