Platform Engineering Economics. A Framework for Quantifying Self Service Infrastructure Return on Investment in Distributed Engineering Organizations

Platform engineering has become the dominant organizational response to the operational and cog‐ nitive load of running distributed software systems at scale. Despite extensive practitioner literature on what platforms should do, comparatively little work addresses how to quantify the economic re‐ turn on platform investment. This paper proposes a framework for evaluating platform engineering investment in distributed engineering organizations, derived from leading the scaling of an enter‐ prise software engineering organization from approximately eight engineers to more than one hun‐ dred while maintaining engineering retention near ninety five percent and migrating from biweekly releases to continuous…