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Platform engineering is a discipline focused on building and maintaining internal developer platforms, which are self-service infrastructure layers that provide standardized tools, workflows and capabilities for application development and deployment. Unlike DevOps, which emphasizes cultural practices and breaking down silos between development and operations teams, platform engineering provides the technological foundation and tooling that enable DevOps principles to be scaled across large organizations. While DevOps represents a methodology and mindset around collaboration and automation, platform engineering delivers concrete platforms that abstract away infrastructure complexity, enabling developers to deploy applications without deep operational expertise while maintaining governance, security and reliability standards.
A study conducted by S&P Global 451 Research provides insights into the evolution of platform engineering, examining adoption drivers, budgets and its relationship to DevOps. Fielded in July and August 2025 among a panel of IT decision-makers, this survey highlights key findings that reveal the rise of formal platform engineering roles, an expanding scope and ongoing challenges in developer adoption.
The Take
Platform engineering (PE) is transitioning from early adoption to mainstream practice, expanding in scope and budget and being fundamentally shaped by AI capabilities. The discipline is expected to grow in more than 60% of organizations we surveyed in terms of teams and platforms, with AI integration becoming universal and transformative across all platform functions. However, success requires addressing the critical challenge of developer adoption, in which 83% of organizations see PE bypassing behavior. Organizations that can build AI-enhanced platforms that developers use more frequently, while maintaining DevOps cultural practices, will gain significant competitive advantages in delivery speed, reliability and innovation capacity.
Summary of findings
PE adoption is gaining momentum. The majority of organizations are in early to middle stages of PE adoption.
The largest segments are partially implementing for specific teams and projects (21% of respondents) and expanding existing initiatives (19%). More than one-quarter of the organizations are either in the planning or research phase (15%) or running a pilot or proof-of-concept initiative (13%). Only 15% have achieved full implementation across multiple teams, while 9% are transforming from DevOps to PE. Less than 1% are scaling back.
This indicates that PE is gaining momentum, but most organizations are still maturing their practices.
PE is playing an expanded role across IT functions. A striking 88% of respondents agree or strongly agree that PE now extends beyond traditional application development to infrastructure provisioning, data platforms, AI integration and other IT functions. Only 11% remain neutral, with minimal disagreement.PE is evolving from a narrow discipline originally focused on application development into a comprehensive approach for managing all IT capabilities. Organizations should plan for this broader scope rather than limiting PE to application development alone.
PE teams and internal development platforms (IDPs) are projected to grow. Organizations display fragmented PE structures: 14% of organizations surveyed operate one team with one platform, 37% have one team supporting multiple platforms, 35% maintain multiple teams with one shared platform, 19% run multiple teams with multiple platforms and 24% have scaled to three or more teams and platforms. Overall, 71% consolidate around either a single team or platform. Future projections are overwhelmingly positive, with 63% expecting growth, 15% anticipating stability and only 2% expecting decreases. Organizations should prepare for significant investment in PE capabilities and hiring, as the discipline is expected to expand substantially.
PE dominates IT budgets, and increases are expected. PE commands substantial IT budget allocations, with 16% of organizations surveyed dedicating more than 35% of their budgets, 32% investing 25-35%, and 45% allocating 15-25% (the largest segment). Lower allocations include 34% of organizations spending 5-15% and 8% committing less than 5%. Future projections reveal strong growth momentum, with 47% expecting budget increases compared to only 2% projecting decreases and 15% anticipating stability. This net growth expectation demonstrates PE’s elevation to strategic priority status, with nearly half of organizations already investing 25% or more of their IT budgets, requiring executives to prepare for substantial financial commitments and resource expansion.
Strategic and technology priorities for PE are dominated by AI. AIdominates the future of PE, with 48% of organizations citing that AI-supplemented development tools are leading strategic priorities, followed by advanced observability and monitoring (38%), DevSecOps expansion (31%) and infrastructure-as-code automation (31%). Meanwhile, respondents also cite open-source tools (24%), unified platforms (24%), agentic process automation (21%), autonomous self-healing infrastructure (20%), low-code/no-code tools (17%) and FinOps integration (11%).
Primary AI use cases include evaluating applications (cited by 36% of respondents), intelligent workload management (34%), enhanced observability (33%), predictive resource scaling (31%), intelligent automation (30%), infrastructure provisioning (28%), continuous integration/continuous development pipeline generation (22%), natural language queries (21%) and anomaly detection (20%).
The AI adoption distributed across development, operations and infrastructure management signals PE’s transformation into an AI-first discipline, requiring comprehensive strategies spanning evaluation, implementation and optimization.
Developers are enthusiastic, but potentially non-committal. A challenge has been revealed, as 83% of respondents indicate that PE teams observe developers either frequently (28%) or sometimes (56%) bypassing the use of PE-created IDPs in favor of their own tools. Only 13% report rare bypassing, and just 3% report consistent use of IDPs.Despite investment in platforms, developer experience and adoption remain challenges. Organizations must focus on making IDPs more attractive than shadow IT alternatives by providing a better user experience, greater flexibility and addressing developer pain points.
DevOps and PE complement each other. The relationship between DevOps and PE within organizations is collaborative rather than competitive: 33% of organizations surveyed support both DevOps and PE implementations and teams, while 23% see DevOps as critical and PE as a part of it. Another 23% view them as complementary, with DevOps being the methodology and PE as the technological approach. Only 13% are transitioning away from DevOps, and 8% consider DevOps mostly dead. Organizations should not view PE as a replacement for DevOps; instead, they should integrate both approaches, recognizing that DevOps culture and practices remain valuable while PE provides the technological foundation and tooling.
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