Posted on November 20, 2023 by Abby Bangser and Josh Gavant

Community post originally published on the TAG App Delivery blog by Abby Bangser and Josh Gavant

The CNCF Platforms Working Group (WG) is excited to present the first release of a platform engineering maturity model which provides a more concrete application of the extremely well received white paper from this past April.

Download now as a PDF or view it on our website.

We want to thank the almost 50 people who have contributed their time and ideas to make this model reflect the state of companies both small and large and across both fast moving and highly regulated industries; all of them are listed below.

The platforms white paper released in April 2023 was always aimed at providing an executive summary on the what and why behind platforms. This paper successfully defined a north star for many organizations but left questions about how they can progress. This new model presents platform engineering as the practice used to offer an internal platform as a product through investment in all parts of building platforms and their capabilities – the people, processes, policy, and technology which in turn drive business outcomes.

Table showing 5 aspects and 4 level of maturity

While presented as a single model with 5 aspects and 4 levels of maturity, the accompanying paper extends well beyond the black and white tick box exercise sometimes associated with maturity models.

Clear explanations of each aspect and each level within an aspect are provided and characteristics and scenarios are provided for each model item. These details have been collected from diverse working group members’ experiences to provide readers a chance to see real world applications hand in hand with the theory behind each progression. In addition, we want your stories to help decorate this model by including examples that you are happy to share. To introduce a new example, please open an issue and share your story.

As readers, we encourage you to remember that it is not only costly, but sometimes actively detrimental to blindly follow any model to the highest level of maturity. Instead, we hope you will use this model to identify both your current and desired characteristics, enabling you to target your investment in the areas you will most benefit from.

Finally, we want to take this opportunity to reintroduce the working group as a welcoming community of companies building platforms, consulting on platforms, and creating tools to support platform builders. We have a number of exciting initiatives in flight and would love to see you get involved including fortnightly meetings to share platform building stories and a deep dive paper on Platform as a Product. For more information please see our website or join the #wg-platforms channel in the CNCF slack.

Thank you to our contributors!

As we reach this milestone we want to thank all the reviewers for all their contributions and feedback:

Resources

Slack: https://cloud-native.slack.com/archives/C020RHD43BP

Mailing list: https://lists.cncf.io/g/cncf-tag-app-delivery