Maturity Model for Platform Engineering

What is Platform Engineering?

In software development, your platform is the set of practices and systems you use to reliability and rapidly build, deploy, and operate your organization’s software. The platform itself is an abstract concept representing dozens of subsystems that work in tandem to accomplish your goals.

Platform engineering is the process of designing those practices and systems within your organization’s unique context. In some organizations, this responsibility falls on a dedicated role or team; in others, platform-level responsibilities are handled by other technical leaders or even the head of engineering / CTO. ^{1 2}

Successful platform engineers excel in two different sets of activities:

• Creating awareness and alignment about the state of the current platform

• Designing and deploying systems that improve the platform effectiveness

In this Framework section of the Panfactum documentation, we provide recommendations for what you can do as a platform engineer to improve awareness and alignment. This complements the Panfactum Stack, which reduces the effort needed to design, deploy, and maintain an effective foundational platform by > 95%.

Gaining Organizational Awareness

Before proposing any platform improvements, the first priority of a platform engineer is to build organizational awareness about the current state of the platform. This awareness is critical for prioritizing the areas of highest impact and for gaining alignment and support for the (often disruptive) changes that you will need to introduce to improve platform effectiveness.

We have found success in breaking organizational awareness into three discrete categories:

• Key performance indicators (KPIs)

• Downtime visibility

• Security backlog

Aligning on Platform Priorities

After providing organizational awareness, you will need to build alignment on what specifically needs to improve to boost your overall effectiveness. However, before diving into tactical improvements, you should provide your organization a strategic vision for what an effective platform might look like.

Fortunately, most organizations trend toward a similar set of long-term platform goals. We are able to bucket those goals into eight core pillars of excellence. These pillars serve as a starting point as you build your own framework and vision for your organization:

• Automation

• Observability

• Security

• Resiliency

• Performance

• Immediate Integration

• Efficiency

• Coordination

The entry for each pillar provides:

• A description of the activities the pillar encompasses

• The concrete business value that should motivate improvement

• Metrics you can use to assess your effectiveness

• Concrete goals / steps that you can take to improve your effectiveness and align your organization with best practices

As you socialize these pillars, the most important gaps will become apparent, not just to you but to the wider organization as well. Soon, you will have all the support you need to build a concrete roadmap to address these gaps and improve your team’s effectiveness.

Next Steps

If you are looking for a concrete place to start, we recommend the Panfactum Stack. The stack combines many of the world’s most trusted open-source projects into comprehensive set of practices and tooling that let you excel on every platform pillar from day one.

Unlike other providers, we believe in the long-term value of understanding and owning your own tooling and systems. Not only does this give you unparalleled flexibility, but our unified approach unlocks new functionality not possible when working with each tool independently.

To learn more, check out our bootstrapping guide which takes you step-by-step through the process of deploying a 10x more affordable, flexible, and featureful platform.