Building digital platforms, and platform engineering teams to support them, isn’t new. The platform approach first emerged more than 20 years ago and predates the DevOps movement that began in the mid-2000s. But the recent surge in popularity of platform engineering has caused some to argue that “DevOps is dead” and modern platform engineering has replaced it. Here’s what we found in the 2023 State of DevOps Report to counter that argument.

DevOps is an approach, not a prescriptive ideal. Still, every organization needs to be able to measure the impact and effectiveness of their investment in DevOps tools and practices. That's why we collected the top DevOps KPIs from a combination of our own research into the latest DevOps trends in the State of DevOps (including surveys of more than 4,000 people) and stories shared with Puppet.

In this blog, we’ll define platform engineering, outline its benefits for software development, explain how it intersects with DevOps, and identify the key components platform engineering needs to be successful.