Trends and Leaders in Platform Engineering and IaC 2025

Welcome to Futuriom's second report on platform engineering and infrastructure as code (IaC)! The trends driving platform engineering and IaC have only increased. Massively scaling datacenters, the rise of AI, and increasingly complex regulatory and governance needs demand better centralized control and compliance in IT and cloud infrastructure.

Futuriom’s primary research with practitioners indicates they need better tools to manage the growing complexity of IT and cloud environments—including cloud-native and traditional enterprise, as well as public, private, and hybrid clouds. They are also struggling to integrate environments to provide their staff with effective automation tools to manage development and infrastructure and improve management goals such as observability and compliance. This report will focus on how platform engineering and IaC are evolving to provide a more robust management and orchestration system for hybrid environments. After spending months talking to end users, investigating public research, and getting briefed about the platform engineering environment, it’s clear that the trend is gathering momentum.

Highlights of the Report

This year's report includes an update on some of the definitions of platform engineering, IaC, and products such as IDPs, which are all part of the platform engineering movement. We also discuss the changing technical and geopolitical landscape, which are introducing new challenges for applications and infrastructure. And of course, we’ll discuss the continued advent of AI, which seems to be taking over the world.

Platform engineering is a growing movement to build a management layer that
can unify automation of app deployment with infrastructure, bringing better
efficiency, compliance, and security to an organization’s IT assets. Our research
across several vectors of vendor and user feedback indicates this market is growing
in importance.
Increasing concerns about cybersecurity, data privacy, and AI are likely to
accelerate the need for platform engineering. Platform engineering can provide
centralized control over data and IT assets, making it a good approach to
implement organizational compliance.
Demand for data for AI apps increases the need for full platform visibility. The
arrival of Gen AI and other flavors of enterprise AI will increase demand for cloud
automation and platform engineering.
Cloud infrastructure spending is shifting toward the need to drive hybrid cloud
automation. Our talks with CxOs indicate that most companies are looking to
accelerate cloud infrastructure, but cloud infrastructure is getting more complex
and practitioners need visibility across a wide variety of infrastructure domains.
Public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and cloud hosting providers are playing a
greater role in platform engineering. Practitioners will gravitate toward cloud
services that provide full platform engineering capabilities, as well as multicloud
and hybrid cloud functionality.

Download the report here now!

Companies Discussed in the Report

Platform engineering is a rapidly evolving cloud technology management discipline with roots in both DevOps and cloud-native architectures. It is focused on creating shared platforms to empower development teams, but it includes a broad range of tools that can also cross into network, compute infrastructure, and cybersecurity.

This report discusses a wide range of companies involved in platform engineering and IaC, including startups, major cloud software companies, as well as cloud providers.

We also discuss IaC, a set of tools that can be used to automate the management and provisioning of infrastructure using code, as well as internal developer platforms (IDPs), which serve as reliable, managed environments for developers.

The largest cloud providers are all focused on providing a central operational control point for platform engineering, along with enhanced AI-related visibility and compliance tools to address the complexity of AI workloads and regulatory demands in 2025.

Companies mentioned in this report: Amazon, Atlassian, Broadcom (VMware), Cortex, GitHub, GitLab, Google, IBM (HashiCorp), Itential, Humanitec, Microsoft, Oracle, Pulumi, Spacelift, System Initiative, Vultr