Google Study: 65% of Developer Time Wasted Without Platforms

For more than a decade, tens of thousands of Google software engineers have been creating and streamlining their innovative work using platform engineering inside the company’s huge and flexible application development environment.

This finely honed internal IT environment continues to be a specialized software building skunk works and resource that brings Google much of its huge business flexibility and success.

Building on that success, Google Cloud is now encouraging other businesses to take the lessons and creativity it has learned through the power and use of platform engineering to bring similar progress and evolution to its own internal operations.

Many businesses are already taking their own steps in platform engineering, according to a research study done for Google Cloud by analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). The 38-page study, Building Competitive Edge With Platform Engineering: A Strategic Guide, asked some 500 global IT professionals and developers for their thoughts and impressions about platform engineering and about the impacts it was having on their businesses.

According to the report, 55% of the respondents said they support bringing platform engineering into their operations, but so far, only 27% of them said they have fully integrated platform engineering tools, processes and culture across most or all of their development teams. Ninety percent of the respondents said they want to expand their platform engineering support to more developers in the future, while 85% of the organizations said that their developers rely heavily on platform engineering to succeed.

“The idea of a platform is to make everybody work together better: the systems guys, the operators, the developers, the SREs and others,” Torsten Volk, a principal analyst with ESG and the author of the Google/ESG report, told The New Stack. Platform engineering is effective at getting the developers to focus on developing instead of on maintaining, updating and patching tools within the platform, which are tasks that are left to systems administrators, he said.

For developers, platform engineering frees them up from the time-sapping tasks of having to maintain their software tools, which leads to companies discovering real savings in money lost to developers being sidetracked from their primary tasks of building applications and value for their companies, said Volk.

“I show a slide during almost every webinar I do, showing that developers waste 65% of their time on stuff that is addressed by platform engineering,” said Volk. “And that is why platform engineering is not optional today.”

For businesses today, that 65% in misplaced developer time quickly adds up to significant monetary savings, said Volk. “I am obsessed with that 65% in lost value. For every $100,000 you pay for development, it means that you only get $35,000 worth of software. Don’t you want $100,000 in value from engineering guys working on applications?”

Any company, from small to large, can gain these kinds of benefits and developer productivity savings from platform engineering, said Volk. “Absolutely yes, because … it always comes back to the 65% of lost developer productivity. Everybody needs to free that up to be more successful.”

Volk, who also has a background in software development, said that this lost value is one of the things that fuels his research efforts.

“As a developer, I have worked on this stuff and I have seen how bad it is,” he said. “That is why I am enthusiastic about fixing it.”

Why Google Commissioned the Google/ESG Study

The Google/ESG study, which was released in January, was undertaken because Google wanted to measure and investigate the maturity criteria around platform engineering and what companies need to do to adopt it and expand their use of it, said Volk. The study also sought to learn how companies are using platform engineering, where they are in the process, and how they are working to increase the impact of their efforts.

One of the successes of Google’s own internal platform engineering efforts is that it is scalable, giving the company the flexibility to use it for broad innovations and projects, said Volk. “The pipeline looks different in every single company,” he said.

In a blog post about the findings of the Google/ESG study on The Google Cloud Blog, authors Ning Ge, a product marketing manager, and Dave Bartoletti, a senior product manager for the company, wrote that platform engineering has passed the tipping point with businesses and can no longer be seen as an optional endeavor for businesses.

And though many companies are working with platform engineering inside their operations already, there is still more work to do, wrote Ge and Bartoletti. Among the steps that companies must take to reach platform engineering success are fostering close collaboration between platform engineers and other teams to keep them aligned; adopting a Platform as a Product approach to provide a clear roadmap and maintain effective feedback loops; and monitoring the project’s success by measuring performance through clear metrics such as deployment frequency, failure recovery time and lead time for changes, they wrote.

“It is noteworthy that while many organizations have begun their platform engineering journey, only 27% of adopters have fully integrated these three key components in their practices, signaling a significant opportunity for further improvements,” continued Ge and Bartoletti.

Platform Engineering and Its Value for AI Use

Intriguingly, 86% of the survey’s respondents also said they believe that “platform engineering is essential to realizing the full business value of AI,” wrote Ge and Bartoletti. “At the same time, a vast majority of companies view AI as a catalyst for advancing platform engineering, with 94% of organizations identifying AI to be ‘Critical’ or ‘Important’ to the future of platform engineering.”

Other benefits of platform engineering include improved employee satisfaction, talent acquisition and retention by fostering a positive developer experience that directly impacts company culture, according to the study. Accelerating software application time to market is another benefit of adopting platform engineering, with 71% of leading adopters saying they have significantly accelerated their time to market, compared with 28% of less mature adopters.

Also interesting in the Google/ESG study is the finding that most companies do not undertake their platform engineering initiatives on their own.

While 96% of the surveyed organizations are leveraging open source tools to build their developer platforms, 84% of them are partnering with external vendors to manage and support their open source environments, the report concluded.

“Co-managed platforms with a third party or a cloud partner benefit from a higher degree of innovation,” wrote Ge and Bartoletti. “Organizations with co-managed platforms allocate an average of 47% of their developers’ productive time to innovation and experimentation, compared to just 38% for those that prefer to manage their platforms with internal staff.”