From Framework to Practice: CNCF’s Platform Engineering Maturity Assessment

When the CNCF Platforms Working Group published the Platform Engineering Maturity Model in late 2023, it felt like an important milestone. I was fortunate to serve as the lead editor of that white paper, and I saw firsthand how the community’s shared experiences were distilled into a simple yet powerful framework for platform teams and others building internal developer platforms (IDPs).

The model helped shift the conversation away from tools and features and towards outcomes. It captured what we see in real organisations, from scattered automation to curated portals, from orchestrated products to federated ecosystems, all without insisting on a single "right" way for all organisations. Most importantly, it provided a language for platform teams, developers, and engineering leadership to align on their current state and desired future direction.

Now, I’m excited to share that the next stage in this work is underway. Corbin Pacheco and a group of community leaders have initiated a new Platform Engineering Maturity Assessment project under the newly formed Platforms Technical Community Group. This assessment provides a practical way for organisations to apply the maturity model to their own context. After almost a year of deliberation, testing, and editing, it’s now available in prototype form.

From framework to practice

The original maturity model was always intended to be descriptive, not prescriptive. It highlights four stages of platform evolution, but it never suggested (and was even careful to discourage the idea) that every organisation should aim for the “optimising” level. Instead, it was designed as a self-assessment tool: a mirror that helps you understand where you are today, what trade-offs you’ve made, and what might be possible next.

Despite the self-serve nature, we learned that, like many platform teams, intended use doesn't always translate to actual use. The group has also learned that the long-form format still leaves many people confused when approaching these new ideas. That is why I am excited that this new assessment prototype takes a different approach to support more self-service of the maturity model value. By answering a set of structured questions, teams receive both a spider chart and a heatmap matrix that show their current strengths and gaps.

These insights matter because platforms are complex, socio-technical products. Without introspection, it can be challenging to identify what gaps exist, and without a clear baseline, it’s easy to misjudge progress. Counting services in a catalogue or portal clicks is not the same as delivering developer and organisational value. The assessment helps shift attention from vanity metrics to meaningful ones.

Why maturity demands balance

Platforms succeed when they balance four pillars: speed, safety, efficiency, and scalability. Focusing too heavily on one at the expense of the others usually leads to trouble. A fast but unsafe platform creates shadow IT. A safe but slow platform drives teams to find ways to bypass it.

Just as human maturity involves a constant balancing and rebalancing of responsibilities and goals across work, family, home, and social engagement, platform engineering maturity is about sustaining the socio-technical balance as your organisational goals and requirements evolve. Early-stage platforms often show cracks when onboarding grows. Mid-stage platforms can lose consistency and sustainability as more teams contribute. Mature platforms risk slowing down if compliance processes are bolted on rather than baked in.

The CNCF maturity model and assessment encourage teams to ask the right questions:

• Do our APIs allow us to evolve our internals without breaking users?

• Are we measuring speed, safety, efficiency, and scalability in a way that informs investment?

• Is contribution part of our culture, or is the platform team still a bottleneck?

These are not checkboxes. They form a balanced platform scorecard for reflection and discussion across the business.

How to get involved

The maturity assessment is still a prototype, and community feedback is vital. You can try it yourself today, generate a shareable link to capture your results, and use that link when giving feedback. This helps the working group understand not just abstract opinions, but how the assessment feels when applied to real contexts.

If you’re leading a platform team, I encourage you to run the assessment with your group. Treat it as a starting point for conversation, not a score to optimise. Use the results to uncover misalignments: perhaps developers think adoption is high while platform engineers see hidden toil in operations. Those tensions are valuable to surface.

Looking forward

The CNCF maturity model gave us a language. The new assessment provides us with a tool. Together, they create a foundation for more grounded, evidence-based platform conversations.

Personally, I find it inspiring to see this work evolve beyond the initial paper. I’ve always believed that platform engineering is as much about people and processes as it is about technology. The assessment reflects that truth, encouraging us to measure not just what we’ve built, but how we're building it and how it's being used, governed, and improved.

If Gartner is correct and 80% of large software engineering organisations will establish dedicated platform engineering teams to create "Internal Developer Platforms" by 2026, having this shared way to reflect and align becomes more important than ever.  I’m seeing the beginnings of this firsthand, as the Syntasso team and I are working with an increasing number of community members and customers who are building platforms with Kratix.

As more organisations adopt IDPs, the real differentiator won’t be how many tools you’ve integrated; it will be how effectively you balance speed, safety, efficiency, and scalability. The CNCF assessment is a practical way to start that journey.