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7 Platform Engineering KPIs you should be tracking

Platform engineering is becoming an increasingly popular approach to software delivery because it offers benefits such as improved time-to-market speed, increased developer happiness, and breaking down of team silos. We wrote extensively about platform engineering, specifically that it’s not, in fact, new and DevOps is not dead. However, given how many enterprises have struggled with delivering DevOps business value, they might view building internal digital platforms to aid software delivery as an actionable plan to achieve everything DevOps ever promised.

But how do you avoid falling into the same trap that held 80% of companies back from adopting DevOps?

Our advice: treat your platform like an internal product, and your wider teams as your customers. This means that your success metrics should be the same as you would use for your customers – with a platform engineering twist.

Key goals of Platform Engineering

When setting up your success metrics, it’s important to not lose sight of what your Platform Engineering strategy should aim for. According to the 2023 State of DevOps report, these were the top goals companies set for their platform teams.

Educating and empowering developer and product teams is a major priority for platform teams, followed by iteration speed and security processes. This people-centric approach is the same one you should adopt in your metrics. Reinventing tools is only half the job – you need to make sure your people are comfortable using the new frameworks. Streamlining and automating processes according to DevX best practices helps the entire organization move more quickly and drive a competitive edge.

Platform Engineering KPIs

According to the 2023 State of DevOps report, after adopting Platform Engineering, the majority of enterprises saw improvements in system reliability (60%), productivity and efficiency (59%), and workflow standards (57%), while 42% reported improved development time.

Productivity

Measuring lines of code produced by developers in X amount of time is an outdated metric used these days perhaps only by the likes of Elon Musk. Developer productivity is a sensitive subject, and while platform engineering promises to speed up software development, it doesn’t happen by making developers deliver more.

Instead, it’s about creating the best conditions for your devs to thrive in. Think about the bottlenecks and obstacles that your teams have to deal with daily and how much they have to rely on experts to get their work done. Complex infrastructure deployments, creating new environments, shipping features – all these require DevOps help, which inevitably clogs up processes. KPIs centered around streamlining and simplifying the software delivery process should be your focus.

  • Lead Time

This is a measurement that tracks the time from when a user story is initiated to when it’s ready for delivery. This time can also include discussions about the user story, how long it was waiting in the backlog, and how much time it took the story to move from pickup to release.

If your lead time for changes is too high, it’s a clear sign of a roadblock somewhere in your processes, causing items in the backlog not to move along. Automating whatever could be automated will help keep your lead time low, as it shows your teams are quick to adapt to feedback and deliver on their goals.

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Cloud Carbon Footprint: GreenOps + FinOps Approach

Cycloid is proud to present Cloud Carbon Footprint, our own cloud carbon emissions module integrated with our established FinOps solution. We’re taking a unique GreenOps + FinOps approach to monitoring cloud computing emissions by connecting your emissions data to your cloud expenses so you see both costs to your budget and the cost to the environment in the same place. We’re hoping this approach will promote a culture of sobriety, where companies will start making more environmentally conscious decisions by reducing the amount of cloud waste.

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Enabling developer self-service in Kubernetes

blog post vignette for Alchemy customer story

Platform engineering is taking the IT world by storm. We’re seeing articles claiming that platform engineering is finally going to end the DevOps reign and achieve everything DevOps never could – agility, automation, developer experience, efficiency and governance. The path to IT transformation and business growth that the new trend paints through self-service seems so painfully obvious, but let us tell you a little secret – it is not new. The trend might be a fresh marketing buzzword, but forward-thinking companies have already been utilizing the benefits of a platform engineering approach. Today’s platform teams are tasked with exactly this: building and maintaining an internal developer platform that connects the end-user to infrastructure management through simple developer self-service and improves efficiency and developer experience.

This idea has been working in practice for a while — and we should know, since improving operational efficiency through a developer platform with self-service is Cycloid’s core offer. We’ve recently used platform engineering to help our client Alchemy scale their automation and move infrastructure to Kubernetes on AWS.

Here’s what we did step by step:

Step 1: Take an Opinionated Approach to the Development Environment

Alchemy is a digital asset management company that helps organizations to implement the open solution for managing digital content using Phraseanet, and starting now with the brand new Phrasea, a promising DAM/MAM on AWS. They have a small team of developers that were able to service their clients needs – but as the company grew, they needed a way to scale up effortlessly. 

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Cloud carbon footprint: measures to take

COP27 took place in Egypt last month, the latest in the series of conferences that bring the global community together in the hope of agreeing on action to mitigate the climate emergency. Many ecologists have questioned how helpful these endless meetings have actually been. Although getting everyone around the table is an important first step, the gathering has received criticism for promoting an all-talk, no-action approach to climate change.

We all have a duty to tackle climate change, and in order to achieve the ambitions set out by successive COP meetings, businesses now need to begin laying the foundation for reducing their cloud computing emissions across every organization. Whilst improving efficiency and digitalizing operations bring with them environmental benefits, IT departments themselves don’t always have visibility over their own carbon footprint. If we are to build a foundation upon which to meet green objectives, this needs to change.

With GreenOps, organizations can massively improve their visibility into the environmental impact of IT operations, putting decarbonization at the heart of decision-making.

At its most basic, GreenOps is a framework for organizations to start understanding the environmental impacts of their IT strategies. Think of it as FinOps, a framework for managing operational expenditure, but for the planet. At the same time, it empowers organizations to promote environmental responsibility at every level through data-driven decision-making and insights.

You can read more about GreenOps here, but the bottom line is that it gives organizations of any size the ability to start taking data-driven decisions to decrease their carbon footprint.

A fair question often asked of proponents of GreenOps is: can we really expect businesses to make more expensive decisions for the sake of the environment? Certainly, in our current economic climate, there is a need for much more sobriety in spending across all industries, so it is a challenge to pick green options over cheaper alternatives. However, if COP27 has shown us one thing, it is that the time to act is now.

Like the decisions at COP27, nobody can guarantee that greener choices will be the easier choices. In fact, many environmentally friendly options are often more expensive and time-consuming than those which cause larger emissions. However, businesses must avoid just “talking the talk” about tackling the climate emergency if they have no intention of putting it into action. GreenOps acts as a fantastic foundation for greener business practices; businesses that are serious about acting more than talking when it comes to environmentalism should look to implement it as a priority.

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Platform Engineering is DevOps with an action plan

If you’ve been around Cycloid socials, you’ll know that we’ve had a quiet change of name – from Cycloid Hybrid Cloud DevOps Platform to Cycloid Platform Engineering. Besides the fact that the new title is less of a mouthful, it’s also a better reflection of what we do here at Cycloid. We are not having a sudden change of heart and reimagining everything the Cycloid platform does – quite the opposite. The core principles of the emerging trend of platform engineering are aligned with the vision Cycloid has been bringing into the world of DevOps and hybrid cloud since its conception – so the soft rebrand was in order.

In a recent article, Gartner described platform engineering as a strategy aimed at “improving developer experience and productivity by providing self-service capabilities with automated infrastructure operations.” This term is trending because of its promise to accelerate product teams’ delivery and increase business value.

Cycloid’s core focus is enhancing developer experience and improving operational efficiency. We’ve seen the need for DevOps and developed a concrete and practical way of achieving it – by enabling developer self-service and opening up DevOps and hybrid cloud adoption to everyone. Platform engineering is simply another word for something we’ve been doing for a long time.

But with this shift towards platform engineering as Gartner predicts, new questions come up – does this mean the end of DevOps? How does platform engineering align with hybrid cloud management? Let’s take some of your most burning questions.

What is Platform Engineering?

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Why the World Needs GreenOps for Sustainability

With COP27 just around the corner, the world is once again set to come together to try to
find a solution to the climate emergency. Given the heat we saw this summer in Europe, it’s
fair to say that urgent action needs to be taken, not just by governments or those in the
energy industry, but by all of us. The IT world is no different and has its own role to play –
for those of us working in IT, that role comes partly in the form of adopting GreenOps. So
what is GreenOps, and why does the world need it?

According to the University of Oxford, a single standard desktop computer operated over a
period of 6 years produces an annual carbon footprint of 778kg of CO2. Emissions from cloud computing are often overlooked, but they actually range from 2.5% to 3.7% of all global greenhouse gas emissions, thereby exceeding emissions from commercial flights (about 2.4%) and other existential activities that fuel our global economy.

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How Cycloid facilitates your DevOps upskilling program

blog post illustration of asset inventory

Amidst the Great Resignation, DevOps talent shortage and the looming global economic crisis, retention of skilled and passionate professionals will continue to be a priority for IT businesses in 2022. After all, skill and talent gaps remain the top hurdle for business transformation, according to DevOps Institute Upskilling Report 2022 that Cycloid co-sponsored. But where do you find the right talent? How do you harvest the much-needed skills?

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Why are MSPs embracing internal developer platforms?

“Adapt or become irrelevant!” is the motto of digital and IT transformation.

Just as IT organizations are under enormous pressure to remain afloat in a tough economy, traditional MSP/SI and IT consultancies also face shrinking margins. While they still hold the higher ground in terms the latest technical expertise, improved security, and cost optimization, the demands of the industry are even higher – and IT consultancies now have to compete with the major cloud providers that have vastly extended and matured their offerings.

Seasoned service providers are opting out for a better solution and partnering up with platforms that can handle the growing demands for DevOps, automation and cloud management – often called internal developer platform or IDP. A platform that supports remote access and collaboration, strong security, multi-cloud monitoring and management and automation is instrumental in IT operations today – and would be an invaluable resource for service providers.

Orange Cloud for Business, a subsidiary of Orange Business Services that manages applications, middleware, and operating systems for third parties, has already chosen improved governance, team collaboration and enhanced customer visibility with Cycloid, the DevOps and hybrid cloud platform. They report 4x faster operations, improved customer service and reduced human error – and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Time is of the essence. Here’s why partnering with an internal developer platform is crucial to an IT consultancy business strategy – both for the clients and internal processes.

Hear from our solution architect:

Attract new customers

There is a gross overabundance of tools and solutions on the market – an average developer uses up to 28 tools daily. There’s certainly a need to simplify and streamline. That’s why a comprehensive developer platform that acts as a cornerstone to multi-and hybrid cloud monitoring, automation, and team collaboration can be the make-or-break element in an IT company’s success.

Any MSP/SI that has such a solution in its portfolio will look like an attractive candidate. Take a look at Cycloid’s self-service portal, automation, and built-in FinOps modules – can you imagine your customers’ eyes lighting up with excitement? We can because we’ve seen it.

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Upskilling Report 2022- our predictions and actual results

At the start of 2022 and ahead of the DevOps Institute’s 2022 Upskilling Report, we made some predictions for the DevOps jobs market, upskilling, and how both topics link with developer experience (DevX). The report is out (and we’re sponsoring it!) and the answers are in – let’s see how aligned they were!

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