Austin, Texas, USA, May 19, 2025
Platform Engineering’s Growing Influence: Kubernetes, Security, AI, and Tools Attract Vendor Attention
According to exciting new research from Futurum, Platform Engineering has achieved a sizable presence in organizations. With organizations reaching the standarding (44%) or mastering (26%) proficiency levels, platform engineers are an increasingly attractive market for vendors due to the rich set of technologies they influence and support.
The platform engineering market, valued at $10.8 billion in 2024, is forecast to expand to $15.9 billion by 2028. Combined with the DevOps and development tools, cloud-native, software security, and the platform technologies they support, the combined market could reach as high as $151 billion with a CAGR of 10% by 2028.
Figure 1: Platform Engineering Technologies Market (2023–2028; in USD Million)
Mitch Ashley, VP & DevOps and Application Development Practice Lead at Futurum, said, “Platform Engineering has a solid presence in organizations because their efforts have a source multiplier effect. The net benefits are real when one team can increase developer productivity and bring standardization to platforms across cloud, Kubernetes, and DevOps.”
The research highlights several areas where platform engineers buy or influence key technologies:
- Roughly half of platform engineering teams provide cloud/multi-cloud management (52%) and dev/test/production environment support (48%). DevOps toolchains (43%), standard platform configurations (42%), and containers/Kubernetes (41%) support are also prevalent in platform engineering teams.
- The most popular Kubernetes services include Google GKE (51%), IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service (44%), Azure Kubernetes Service (43%), and Amazon EKS (32%).
- Over the next 12-18 months, a significant percentage of organizations are increasing their spending on development environments (79%), automated deployment (79%), developer portals (75%), and CI/CD (67%) solutions.
AI has quickly made its way into the work of platform engineers and developers. The survey shows that platform engineering (43%) and development (41%) are already using AI in portions of their work.
“As AI adoption increases across technology and end-user organizations, AI is landing on the plates of platform engineers,” noted Ashley. “Based upon our decision-maker data, AI is the number one workload deployed on Kubernetes.”
The DevOps and Application Development Decision-Maker survey comprehensively examined the software development lifecycle, zeroing in on the utility and maturity of platform engineering within organizations. Other technology areas platform engineering covers include Infrastructure-as-Code (44%), securing platform configurations (43%), release management (41%), and self-service internal developer portals (40%).
Read more in the reports “1H 2025 DevOps and Application Development Market Sizing & Five-Year Forecast” and “1H 2025 DevOps and Application Development Decision-Maker Survey Report” on the Futurum Intelligence Platform.
About Futurum Intelligence for DevOps and Application Development
Futurum Intelligence’s DevOps and Application Development IQ service provides actionable insight from analysts, reports, and interactive visualization datasets, helping leaders drive their organizations through transformation and business growth. Subscribers can log into the platform at https://app.futurumgroup.com/, and non-subscribers can find additional information at Futurum Intelligence.
Follow news and updates from Futurum on X and LinkedIn using #Futurum. Visit the Futurum Newsroom for more information and insights.
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Author Information
Mitch Ashley is VP and Practice Lead of DevOps and Application Development for The Futurum Group. Mitch has over 30+ years of experience as an entrepreneur, industry analyst, product development, and IT leader, with expertise in software engineering, cybersecurity, DevOps, DevSecOps, cloud, and AI. As an entrepreneur, CTO, CIO, and head of engineering, Mitch led the creation of award-winning cybersecurity products utilized in the private and public sectors, including the U.S. Department of Defense and all military branches. Mitch also led managed PKI services for broadband, Wi-Fi, IoT, energy management and 5G industries, product certification test labs, an online SaaS (93m transactions annually), and the development of video-on-demand and Internet cable services, and a national broadband network.
Mitch shares his experiences as an analyst, keynote and conference speaker, panelist, host, moderator, and expert interviewer discussing CIO/CTO leadership, product and software development, DevOps, DevSecOps, containerization, container orchestration, AI/ML/GenAI, platform engineering, SRE, and cybersecurity. He publishes his research on FuturumGroup.com and TechstrongResearch.com/resources. He hosts multiple award-winning video and podcast series, including DevOps Unbound, CISO Talk, and Techstrong Gang.
