Platform as a Product, 2017 to 2026 – not much changed, which is the point

I updated our Platform as a Product paper recently, available here as a PDF. This paper has a long history: it was first published in 2017, updated in 2018, and then 2021. The concept was core to Pivotal Software – both in Pivotal Labs and with Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

After Humanitec killed DevOps, around 2022, they established the “platform engineering” category, and that sure did take off. That community of course glommed onto platform as a product.

There’s not that much different from 2017 to now, which is a good thing – there’s more experience, more stories, and the platform managed to survive kubernetes blocking out all the sun for five or so years.

Check out the paper, it’s a good, brief start to understanding the mindset and approach to making IaaS and CaaS usable for developers.