Tag: platformengineering
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Using AI to play Role Playing Games – Building tools to play Dungeons and Dragons is playing D&D…?
I wanted to see how much time I spend playing D&D with AI versus building the tooling for playing D&D with AI. Charted across 4,245 conversations back to 2023: harness building goes from 5% to 53%. The cobbler’s curse – you love making shoes so much you never walk around in them.
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Platform as a Product, 9 years later
Nine years after the platform as a product paper first came out, Caleb Washburn and I went through what changed. The answer is mostly “not much,” and the good bit is why developers keep asking for Kubernetes clusters they don’t actually want.
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AI ends up like spreadsheets – Software Defined Talk #124 with Bryan Ross
I’m old enough to remember how much time and agony we spent explaining to managers the importance of context switching for developers, and how they should have meeting free Fridays… And now the same people that we’re trying to help are bragging about how distracted they are. Bryan Ross, SDI #124. Check out this week’s…
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DIY Platform – don’t do it
Here’s the 15 minute version of my overview of why you should buy your platform instead of building it. It’s based on the paper I co-authored on the topic. You can find the slides here, and there’s also a longer version of the talk from cfgmgmtcamp 2026. If you want to see more of my…
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How AI change your software development organization
A catch-up with Purnima Padmanabhan, GM of the Tanzu Division at Broadcom, on what her team has actually learned shipping enterprise software with AI for the last year and a half: code generation is the small part, beautiful code is the new uncanny valley, and you cannot solve the agent boundary problem from inside the…
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“PE 2.0”
We are seeing a distinct movement where infrastructure is being reclaimed as a first-class platform concern. In the early days, platform engineering focused heavily on developer experience, often treating the underlying infrastructure as a utility that was managed separately. That is no longer sufficient. To succeed in the AI era, platform teams must have deep…
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Patching CVEs at AI speed is a platform engineering problem
AI-assisted vulnerability discovery cut the gap from CVE published to weaponized exploit from weeks to hours. Quarterly patch windows and hand-rolled CVE spreadsheets are no longer a defensible posture.
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AI Pees in the Pool, Permanent Indenture, and the Metric Fuck-Ton – Related to your interests, Monday
Also: does anyone actually use microwave food-buttons? Castanet handler. Related to your interests Platform Engineering in the Age of AI: Why Operational Complexity Is the New Bottleneck – “while coding is becoming cheaper and faster, operational complexity hasn’t disappeared” // Day 2 operations is always the bottleneck. // Also included is the current Syntasso/Kratix pitch.…
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Let them tinker – hacking developer resistance to sound enterprise architecture and platforms
Developers need to tinker or they’ll reject your platform. That is a lesson that people who build tools and platforms for developers learn. The more ambitious your platform is in scale, the more tinker resistance you encounter – you want it to be the platform that 10,000’s of developers at a bank use, for example.…
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When Developer Workflow Discipline Isn’t Enough thectoadvisor.com/blog/2026… Selling cross-silo enterprise infrastructure stuff is very difficult: These are platform engineering objections. And they’re coming from a team the vendor never talked to. Because the vendor optimized their story for developer adoption. They have research that tells them developers love this. What they don’t have is a…
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Kubernetes alone does not a platform make
Even the platform engineers need to hide Kubernetes to get their job done: Kubernetes adds another layer of complexity for platform engineering teams, introducing architectural complexities that require a deep understanding of containers, networking, storage, and cluster security protocols. While it has become the default runtime for modern applications, managing Kubernetes at scale alongside existing…
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Here are the slides for the talk I’ll be giving at @cfgmgmtcamp.bsky.social later today, at 2pm. It’s based on the DIY pitfalls paper I revised recently. CfgMgmtCamp #PlaformEngineering
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Amazon Should Buy Anthropic, AI Doctors, Metaverse RIP
Original Content Amazon should buy Anthropic. I wasn’t really sure what hardned images were, let alone “distroless,” so Tony and I were lucky to get William on this week’s Tanzu Catsup to sort it out. We also discuss how it fits into platform engineering. If you can’t be bothered, here’s an excerpt on optimizing Helm…
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Why people build their own platforms anyway – resume-driven development and the joy of building
Every list of reasons to build your own platform leaves off the real ones: resume-driven development, and that builders like building things. Do you fight that, or adapt the platform philosophy to it?
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What is a platform and how do you do platform engineering at scale? Find out in this interview on tales from Home Depot and beyond.
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Digital Transformation Fatigue, and how to get over it – DOGE case study
This is the story of most large IT transformation/modernization efforts. Once the executives that started it leaves, it stops. Then a new one comes in that does almost the opposite. Put all your apps in the cloud, bring all your apps on-premises. Tide goes out, tide comes in. That pattern of course fuels staff “modernization…
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Remember when DevSecOps was all the rage?
Enterprises are till trying to figure out DevSecOps: [M]any organizations remain stuck in siloed approaches that pose problems due to competing demands for speed, efficiency and risk reduction. Enterprises that effectively integrate security into software development and deployment–both through platforms and tools, and via cross-team collaboration– are better positioned to drive velocity, quality and innovation…
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Platform Engineering Anti-Patterns
This is has some new material in it, not just the same old transformation discussion from agile and DevOps. So: thumbs up! 🔗 8 platform engineering anti-patterns
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Can’t stop hitting yourself
The problems feel like something we should have moved passed long ago. The general problems and patterns are not new. Why do they persist? 🔗 Why Up to 70% of Platform Engineering Teams Fail to Deliver Impact
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Everybody talks about digital transformation, but nobody does anything about it.
Recording of my AI platform engineering talk This is a new talk of mine going over how platform engineers can support AI. Well, it’s more about how we don’t exactly know, but we can speculate based on a handful of early use cases. Here’s the slides if you’re into that kind of thing. Here’s the…
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