Plus…

• If you missed it, Platform Weekly is in the process of moving to Substack! So don’t be confused or surprised when the changes start coming into effect;)

• I wrote a book, Thinking in Platforms! If you haven’t had a chance to take a look or pre-order it. You can find it here. It’s the culmination of almost 10 years of platform thinking and development. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Your platform was built for a different era.

I had five different versions of the same conversation last month. An exec going crazy over token bills. A security platform engineer staring down the EU AI Act & CRA. A platform lead whose data scientists needed GPUs yesterday. Different people, different rooms, and somehow the exact same problem. Platform Weekly has been touching on each of these issues over the last couple months again and again…

Your platform can probably handle any one of these. What it was never built for is all of them hitting you in the face at once. Every one of them is really just a fresh way for the cost of chaos to show up on your platform.

That convergence is exactly what our own Sam Barlien and Pankaj Gupta over at Broadcom dug into for their latest whitepaper on the future of platform engineering, and unpacked live in a new community webinar yesterday. They name the 5 forces that are hitting (or will be hitting) your platform.

• AI codeapalooza: 90% of devs are pairing with AI assistants and shipping 2 to 10x more code. Don’t need me to tell you this. Every single person reading this is experiencing it. (And if you aren’t.. reply and let me know what you’re doing;) Code was never the hard part, delivering it is, and the platform you built for human pace isn’t going to handle it. This was never a model race. The models are commoditizing. The thing that actually separates the teams pulling ahead is the platform harnessing all that output, not whichever model they picked.

• Deluge of non-human users: A supremely exciting and powerful new persona has arrived, and lord is it needy. GPU allocation, MCP gateways, guardrails so it doesn’t go rogue, and an audit trail for every move it makes. Your platform has never served anyone like this. It isn’t enough to just assign an “Test engineer agent” the same permissions as the test engineer. It’s not enough to assign it the identity as a microservice. So wtf do you do?

• The FinOps / AI bill reckoning : Around 35% of cloud spend is already pure waste. This was already a huge challenge then AI infra and token spend pour fuel straight on the fire. We’ve well and truly exited the era of experimental tokenmaxing, and your platform problem isn’t ready for it. How are you handling it? Usage controls? Model routing? You need to get that cost under control, but without stymying innovation and velocity.

• New era of regulation fun: The EU AI Act, US executive orders, data residency rules, all landing at once and all landing on you. Compliance is being rewritten faster than most platforms can even read it.

• Everyone is important: Security, data science, FinOps, the business, they all need the platform now, not just the developers you first built it for. This is the user persona shift, and it is only getting wider. Serving one persona was hard enough. The whole org is a different sport entirely.

So… what do you do then?

Here is the good news. You don’t burn it down and start over. The fundamentals of platform engineering are exactly what carry you through this. This is an evolution, not a reset.

So pick the force screaming loudest right now, the one where you already have the exec attention and the budget, and start there. Treat the five as one connected evolution, not five side projects. And whatever you do, don’t let the foundations crack while you chase the shiny new thing. A wobbly base under a GPU workload and a fleet of hungry agents is a very bad place to be. Get the fundamentals rock solid first, then stretch them to carry the new load. That is the whole game.

A few weeks ago I broke down how the CRA is an opportunity for platform engineers. Find those opportunities. Use them to secure budget, and lock focus - and ride this wave. It’s gonna be epic.

Whether your platform is quietly absorbing the deluge or drowning under it, this is the hour to spend. Watch Sam and Pankaj walk through all five. Read the whitepaper. Get your surfboard out.

Quick bites

Highlight of the week

• How to prepare for the AI-mediated Vulnpocalypse

From the community

• Want to catch the PlatformCon talks and workshops you missed? We’re adding more every week to the community YouTube channel.

And that’s a wrap on this week! As always, this newsletter is a community project. So if you have anything awesome to share from the cloud-native world, send it my way.

Stay crunchy 🥐

Luca

Plus…

• Platform Weekly moves to Substack! I am very excited to share that we are (finally) moving Platform Weekly over to Substack starting over the next few weeks:)

• AND reminder that my friends at Tailscale are organizing an awesome conference - TailscaleUp! There are still some tickets available, so take a look. They’ll be in San Francisco on August 26, 2026! It’s gonna be a banger. They’re going to be dissecting and sharing the lessons from their 20k customers through a bunch of great talks and workshops. Few things more important than networking and security at the moment. And there is prob no better place to be for it ;)

“How the hell am I gonna build an ADP?”

I’ve been talking about Agentic Development Platforms (ADPs) nonstop the last month. You’ve probably noticed. ADPs are the platform that lets your engineers and AI agents build software together, safely, with guardrails. We covered them extensively at PlatformCon, in our review newsletter, and in Ajay’s guest newsletter last week. The response from everyone has been incredible. I’ve received so many replies. But there is one sliver of doubt that keeps getting slivered back to me - “I don’t even have a good IDP yet, or an effective AI initiative in my org. How the hell am I gonna do this?”

Fair question. If the PlatformCon deluge settled anything, it’s that the ADP is where our discipline is heading. But recognizing the future and knowing what to do about it on Monday morning are two VERY different things. Some of the industry seems to be sprinting, and the other half is still trying to get one golden path adopted.

So how do you close this gap? You close it the way our community has always closed gaps… by learning the discipline properly, step by step, from the foundations up.

That is how you secure your place in the AI future. And ride this insane wave.

Remember - an ADP is your IDP evolved, not replaced. Three layers, the tooling you already run, the path definitions that humans and agents both invoke, and a new agent infrastructure substrate underneath. If you can build and reason about those layers, you aren’t the person threatened by this new paradigm, you’re the person who makes it work.

That’s why, that is exactly the journey the new AI learning path on Platform Engineering University walks you through, taught by Mallory Haigh, who some of you caught on the New York main stage at PlatformCon. And it is built for the “I’m not there yet” reality, because it starts from wherever you actually are:

• Intro to Agentic Development Platforms (free, 1 hour, on-demand). Start here, even if your IDP is still a work in progress. Four modules: the IDP to ADP architecture shift, the three layers, designing probabilistic, deterministic, and hybrid paths that keep agents on track, and where to start building, including how to measure outcomes over your first 90 days.

• Agentic Development Platforms. The core of this path, and your real next step. Evolve the IDP you have (yes, the imperfect one) into an ADP that makes coding agents safe, governed, and productive at enterprise scale. This is where the concepts become your architecture. You will work through what it takes to design the paths that agents consume, put the guardrails and governance in place, and treat agents as first-class users of your platform (without losing control of cost, security, or quality along the way..)

• Agent Infrastructure for Platform Engineers (instructor-led, starts November 12). For when you’re ready to go all the way in: a hands-on build of the harness and governance plane that agents actually run on. The advanced step once the ADP course is under your belt.

Notice what that sequence actually is. It is the answer to the question. You do not need a perfect IDP or a board-approved AI strategy to start. You need one free hour to understand the architecture, then a structured way to evolve what you have.

AI is reshaping our industry all around us. And platform engineering is the foundation to do it effectively, and safely. There is no greater opportunity for you and your org.

So, how the hell are you gonna do this? One hour at a time. What are you waiting for?

Highlight of the week

• The cost benefits of modernizing your VM fleet (that no one talks about)

From the community

• Want to watch the recordings of PlatformCon workshops and talks you weren’t able to attend? We’re uploading more every day on the community YouTube channel.

And that’s a wrap on this week! As always, this newsletter is a community project. So if you have anything awesome to share from the cloud-native world, send it my way.

Stay crunchy 🥐

Luca

Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly. Your weekly peek behind the platform engineering curtain. Every week, we dive into best practices, news, lessons, and updates from the platform engineering community. This is a guest newsletter by my friend Ajay Chankramath who leads at Platform Engineering Consulting, the advisory and consulting wing of the Platform Engineering community!

But first… I WROTE A BOOK!

At its core the book is about one idea. Platform engineering is becoming the operating model for knowledge work in the AI era. The book is a conceptual model and a practical playbook for redesigning how organizations work in the AI era, across software, marketing, finance, legal, any kind of knowledge work.

Preorder your copy now!

The ADP is coming. Your IDP better be ready

PlatformCon 2026 just wrapped last week virtually as well as in London and New York. One word dominated the agenda - agentic!

Gregor Hohpe talked about platforms defying the laws of IT physics in London. Patrick Debois called context the new code. Kief Morris challenged us to put humans on the loop, not in it.  By all accounts, Bruno Passos and Mansi Mittal’s session on their GenAI platform journey at Booking.com was a standout.

In New York, Kelsey Hightower made listeners take a step back from the AI euphoria in his talk on Zero Token Architecture. Jay Moran from Fiserv showed what golden path scaling actually looks like at enterprise scale.

Kaspar and Luca introduced the idea of Agentic Development Platforms (ADPs) in their keynote both days. I took both main stages to talk about architecting Agentic Development Platforms, with Mallory joining me in New York. Think of ADP as an extension of an IDP, but the paths serve agents too in addition to humans (not instead of), so that it can run without direct human intervention when needed. I care about this because every week we talk to organizations being pushed to support agentic workflows without a solid IDP foundation underneath. 

PlatformCon was not all about AI. 55% of our talks focused exclusively on building the IDP/foundations right and only about 45% had AI focus. Still significant change in direction, but the focus continued to be IDP. For good reason.

I talked to hundreds (over 300+!) of you across the week through our executive breakfast gatherings, therapy sessions, and the platform clinic as well as my book signings. Teams hear “ADP” and immediately jump to agents, LLMs, orchestration layers. They picture autonomous systems dispatching work, validating changes, remediating incidents without humans in the loop. The destination is absolutely right, but you can’t build an Agentic Developer Platform on a broken Internal Developer Platform.

An IDP standardizes paths for humans. An ADP makes those same paths executable by agents. If the human paths are inconsistent, undocumented, or held together by tribal knowledge, agents won’t fix that. They’ll amplify the mess. This is where the “paths” matter. They’re the connective tissue between your IDP today and your ADP tomorrow. 

Most enterprises I talk to are in their early stages of building the platforms to support AI workloads. Closing that gap is the work that matters right now, and it starts with rearchitecting your IDP into an ADP.

We also ran Platform Clinic for the Age of AI sessions at both live days in addition to 1:1 advisory conversations with engineering leaders. Platform Clinic was where several of you came together to talk about the key challenges that your teams are encountering, but instead of one speaker telling you what their perspective is, this was an opportunity to work in a small group to come up with solutions yourself. We had about 5 prompts we discussed around platform value, need to build the foundations right, agentic identity, golden paths and when to choose an agent.  If you missed them and want a similar read of where your platform stands, that’s exactly what we do at Platform Engineering Consulting, and I’d love to talk with you about it.

AI workloads require platform engineering. But only if the platform is actually ready. To quote Kaspar and Luca from their new book, Thinking in Platforms, “AI expands what is possible, but platforms define what is usable”.

Quick bites

Highlight of the week

• How can a Context Lake cut down up to 80% of your token usage?

From the community

• Want to watch the recordings of PlatformCon workshops and talks you weren't able to attend? We're uploading more every day on the community YouTube channel.

Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly. Your weekly toast of platform engineering champagne. Every week, we bring you the best of what the community is reading, watching, and building. This week, we are talking about the last five days. PlatformCon 2026. The largest platform engineering week in history.

Everything you missed at PlatformCon this week

This was the biggest week platform engineering has ever had. Around 1,800 of you were with us in person across Live Day London and Live Day New York, and almost 50,000 more joined online, watching talks, getting hands dirty in workshops, and celebrating the discipline together🥹

The line up of speakers was incredible. My friends Kaspar von Grünberg, Ajay Chankramath, Mallory Haigh, joined by community and industry titans Gregor Hohpe, Nicki Watt, Kelsey Hightower, Patrick Debois, Caroline Wong, Kief Morris, Jay Moran and so many more. The talks spanned everything that matters to us right now. The agentic future, the infrastructure agents actually run on, how to actually build, run and succeed with agents and platforms and ofc the classic deep dives into sovereignty, security, supply chain, Kubernetes and GitOps, and mastering product thinking. If platform engineering is becoming the operating model for the modern enterprise, and we know it is, this was the week the whole community pushed us 100 steps forward.

There was a LOT announced this week, because there is a LOT happening.

• Thinking in Platforms: the new book from Kaspar and me, lands August 18. It distils ten years of learnings on platform engineering as the operating model for work in the AI era. We break down a new way to understand platforms as production systems for knowledge work, an abstract model for reasoning about and architecting golden paths and platforms, and a playbook for moving from first initiatives to production readiness and scale with a focus beyond the world of just IT.

• AgenticCon: a brand new one-day event all about agents, AI, and agentic infrastructure, arrives February 2027, co-located with PlatformCon San Francisco. Early access now! A new format for a new era.

• PlatformCon World Tour: We’re going global. The Live Day format isn’t just heading to Paris, Sydney, and São Paulo, but to San Francisco too! Couldn't make it in person this week? Now you can, from all over the world!

• Two new courses on Platform Engineering University: One on the move from IDP to ADP, and a deep dive on agent infrastructure itself!

And the big one that underpins all of this. We broke down the reference architecture for agentic development platforms, the ADP. It builds on your existing IDP, treats agents as users and interfaces, and splits into three layers: tooling, path specifications, and a new breed of agent infrastructure. The thesis? Without platforms, there is no productivity gain from agents. That statement is what sets everything that PlatformCon was about this week, and what the entire community is working off of.

What's still coming? A lot. The virtual program ran all five days, with 300+ hours of talks and virtual workshops dropping batch by batch across learning paths on the agentic future, sovereignty, security, Kubernetes, and more. You won't get through it in one sitting, nobody does, we all have 20 tabs open!

We are at an inflection point that will define the future of not just our industry, but basically all industries - and platform engineers sit at the very heart of that change.

The challenge and the opportunity literally couldn't be bigger. PlatformCon encapsulated that perfectly. Now let's embrace it together!

Quick bites

Highlight of the week

• How can a Context Lake cut down up to 80% of your token usage?

From the community

• Want to watch the recordings of PlatformCon workshops and talks you weren't able to attend? We're uploading more every day on the community YouTube channel.

Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly. Your weekly knead of platform engineering dough. Every week, we let the best of the community rise to the top and bring it to you warm.

Plus… PlatformCon CTA

Your platform won the argument. Now it has to evolve.

I keep having the same conversation. On panels, in Slack, at dinner after talks. And I know already it will be the #1 topic next week at PlatformCon 2026. Platform engineering has basically won. 90% of organizations have adopted it, 76% run a dedicated platform team, and nobody serious is still arguing about whether to build an internal platform.

And yet. The platform that won that argument was built for a different era. Overly, developer focused, human speed, and like last week approaching problems by being faster or better without recognising we’re in a new paradigm.

That gap is exactly what our own Sam Barlien dug into in a new whitepaper on Platform Engineering 2.0: An evolution for the AI era, co-authored with Pankaj Gupta over at Broadcom. It is the clearest map I've seen of how platforms have to stretch for the AI era. They break down how you should be thinking about your IDP. An evolution, not a reset. Your existing platform is the substrate for what comes next, not the casualty of it.

Sam lays the stretch out across five shifts:

• AI workloads become first-class citizens. GPUs, model serving, and MCP gateways flowing through the same self-service path as everything else.

• Agents arrive as a brand new user. The first non-human persona in over a decade, needing scoped identity, guardrails, and audit logging.

• Cost turns into a platform signal. FinOps moves out of the monthly rear-view report and into the moment of provisioning.

• Security shifts down into the substrate. Not piled onto developers, baked into the platform so every path is a secure path and AI security gaps addressed.

• Architecture gets composable. Repavable, API-first building blocks instead of the tired build-versus-buy standoff.

None of this throws away what you already built. Platform as Product, golden paths, self-service IDPs, they are all a fundamental part of this. The discipline doesn't restart at each phase. It accumulates. So while other fields spend this year asking if they still matter in an agentic world, platform engineers are staring at the single biggest expansion of mandate the discipline has ever seen.

The team that masters infrastructure for the AI era is the team that masters the AI era, and that starts with treating infrastructure as a first-class platform concern rather than the thing under the floorboards

There is no truly better primer before PlatformCon next week. So read this. And be ready to discuss it at the world’s biggest platform engineering conference in just a few days.

Quick bites

Highlight of the week

• 5 pillars your platform needs in 2026 and beyond

From the community

• Want to watch the recordings of PlatformCon workshops and talks you weren't able to attend? We're uploading more every day on the community YouTube channel.

Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly. Your weekly sweep of the platform engineering perimeter. Every week, we round up the sharpest thinking in the community and hand you the one story you can't afford to ignore.

Plus… we’re just two weeks away from PlatformCon! It’s your last chance to get tickets and say hi in London or New York!

You can't patch your way out of this anymore

I've been having the same conversation on repeat lately, with a bunch of you in the community. The patching treadmill is totally f*cked. We spent the last year just trying to run faster to outpace it - and I think it’s time to stop. And I don’t mean give up.

For thirty years the playbook was find the CVE, ship the fix, apply the patch, repeat. That made sense when vulnerabilities came in the hundreds and attackers took weeks to move. That world is GONE.

• 48,185 CVEs were published in 2025, up 163% from 2020. FIRST's median forecast for 2026 is nearly 60,000, and some people are suggesting 100,000+.

• The Linux kernel alone accounted for 5,530 CVEs last year, a pace of 8 to 9 new ones every single day.

• In 2020, attackers needed 30 days on average to weaponize a new CVE. By 2025 the median was under 5 days.

• 28% of vulnerabilities in 2025 were exploited on disclosure day or before a patch even existed. For that group the average time-to-exploit was negative one day. The fix didn't exist yet.

• Meanwhile organizations take 88 days on average to remediate a critical vuln (not to mention NIST has stopped bothering categorizing all of them…) You're on your own to figure out severity.

Those numbers come from Justin Garrison, Field CTO at Sidero Labs, in a piece called Patching Won't Save You. Oof. It's a banger, and it reframes the whole problem.

This is a fundamental platform engineering problem now NOT a patching problem. If attackers exploit in hours and no change advisory board on earth runs at machine speed, then a faster pipeline was never going to be the answer. The answer is to have less to patch. Sounds easy doesn’t it?;)

That's the game. Shrink the surface. If a package isn't there, the CVE against it simply doesn't apply to you. Justin has another great article on his favourite example Copy Fail, a 732-byte script that claimed to root every Linux distro shipped since 2017.

Talos Linux, which is an open source Linux OS for K8s, which Justin and the folks at Sidero Labs have been maintaining, is basically immune to this. No shell, no package manager, not even a Python interpreter, most of the exploit had nothing to grab onto. Whole categories of risk just come off the board.

That is how you need to think about these security problems going forward. If you aren't thinking secure by default, then to be honest, you're not thinking at all.

So here's what I want you to do this week - stop asking how fast you can patch, and start asking how much you can delete. Read Justin's full breakdown, take a look at Talos Linux, then go count the packages in your base image you've never once called.

Quick bites

Highlight of the week

• 5 pillars your platform needs in 2026 and beyond

From the community

• Want to watch the recordings of PlatformCon workshops and talks you weren't able to attend? We're uploading more every day on the community YouTube channel.

Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly. Your weekly altitude check of platform engineering ambition. Every week, we bring you the sharpest thinking from the community, straight to your inbox.

Plus… 28.1% of teams (so far) say they are massively struggling with shadow AI. What about you? Answer our State of AI in Platform Engineering survey and let us know!

How to become an agentic organization

5 years ago when I was talking about platform engineering, it was hard to tell whether I was truly ahead of the curve or was the lunatic people kept telling me I was. For the first time in a while, I'm starting to get that feeling every day again. I love it.

My friend Ajay Chankramath, CTO at Platform Engineering Consulting and Community Ambassador ran an awesome webinar yesterday on what it actually takes to turn a software organization agentic. Not just walking through our theory of the four levels I broke down a few weeks ago, but the practical leadership decisions that determine whether your org actually climbs them. This is the same type of thing he and the team will be talking about at PlatformCon in a few weeks. If you’re in NYC or LDN, you need to come chat about it.

The four levels:

• Level 1: Human in the loop

• Level 2: Human on the loop

• Level 3: Humans as orchestrators

• Level 4: Fully autonomous

So why does this matter? Well, our data shows that 88% of firms are running AI coding experiments. 5.5% report significant business impact. I’ve said it before. It's not a model problem. It's whether your production systems are designed to capture value at organizational scale.

The majority of organizations are at L1 trying to get to L2. The tooling jump from L1 to L2 is truly tiny. What you have to do as a leader to move from L2 to L3 is what organizations are failing at.

Three bottlenecks we’ve noticed across the 100+ orgs he’s talked to this year:

• Work dispatch: Your sprint model assumes sequential human work. When agents generate PRs in parallel, you need a proper dispatch path which means clear agent identity, scope definition, and workspace provisioning. Without it, agent work has nowhere to land.

• Validation loops: Traditional validation is a gate. For agents, it needs to become a loop. Agents iterate through CI, security scans, and policy checks until they pass. Gate-based review at L2 volume will drown your engineering org.

• Risk governance: Who approved that agent-generated change? Which non-human identity modified that API contract? Without agent-aware audit trails, you can't pass a regulatory audit. That's a current problem, not a future one.

• Leadership alignment: None of these can be solved by engineering teams working independently. They require executive mandate. Consistency across the org determines whether agents run at scale, or whether you've just rebuilt tool sprawl with a language model on top.

Governance enables velocity. It doesn't restrict it. That's the operating principle you need to keep coming back to, and what distinguishes L3 organizations from the rest.

There is a reason we keep banging on about it. We're talking about operationalizing AI agents. It's the governance and cultural questions that are the most important. If you haven't read our mini-white paper on this, then that's a great place to start.

We're not in the territory now where nobody's sure how to proceed to get value.

We're in the territory of people getting value and people falling behind.

Highlight of the week

• How to build a network your future self won't hate

From the community

• Want to watch the recordings of PlatformCon workshops and talks you weren't able to attend? We're uploading more every day on the community YouTube channel.

º

Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly. Your weekly sip of platform engineering grappa. Every week, we round up the best the community has been cooking, with best practices, community updates and news.

The maturity growth of AI in platform engineering is like nothing I have ever seen before. It took four years for the conversation in platform engineering to change from "what is this thing" to "here is the specific formula to do it best". I've watched that change with AI firsthand over the last 6 months.

Nothing captures that change better than the community's annual report, The State of AI in Platform Engineering. For one thing, it's not annual anymore. We put out the last one 7 months or so ago. And we're about to put out the next.

That's right. Sam and I are currently writing The State of Platform Engineering Vol. 2, and I need your help to finish it. And at the same time you can benchmark where you stand on AI.

This was an annual report that has to come out 6 months early, simply because, as I read back Vol.1, it feels like it was published ten years ago. So, what is in this one that just can’t wait 6 more months?

• A detailed breakdown of the Agentic Development Platform from how to transition your IDP into one, what it does, how it works and how it drives AI ROI across your entire organization (And not just your IT organization;). Basically: How are teams failing with, succeeding with, and getting ROI from agents?

• A breakdown of how platform engineering intersects with AI infrastructure, from open source, composable stacks put out by NVIDIA, AMD etc to how GPU economics and management are becoming 1st class problems for your platform

• How to benchmark yourself and your team, and what it really means to be an "AI-native" organization. What are the best teams doing, and where is the industry at large?

We are asking what teams use AI for, how orgs structure their AI initiative (from security to mandates), how AI identities are managed, how teams are approaching validation, shadow AI, threat risks, cost issues, and of course, throughout, ROI and maturity. This will be the definitive snapshot of where the industry is right now.

I experienced firsthand a few months ago, where I was walking around feeling like I was absolutely at the forefront of AI, then had dinner with some friends and realized, "Oh shit, I'm behind. Very behind."

This is a common trend among so many people that I talk to. Folks suddenly realizing (or not noticing at all…) that they are way behind where the frontrunners are.

This report intends to solve that. Help us finish it.

Highlight of the week

• Turning software teams agentic; a leadership perspective

From the community

• Want to watch the recordings of PlatformCon workshops and talks you weren't able to attend? We're uploading more every day on the community YouTube channel.

Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly. Your weekly stir of the platform engineering pot. Every week, we round up the best the community has been cooking, with a side of warm takes from your friendly neighborhood host.

Plus… we have launched Platform Engineering Consulting (PEC)!! I am super excited to share that we are making it easier for teams to work with us. Check out the website to understand what it’s all about.

Last week I pinged a bunch of you about an upcoming community webinar on the Cyber Resilience Act and the response… was basically a shrug. Oof. The wave of regulation tightening through 2026 (CRA, EU AI Act etc) isn't just a hassle for the CISO. It's the single biggest opportunity platform teams have been handed in years, and you're sleeping right through it.

The dream world regulators live in is, almost word for word, the dream world a platform team wants to live in. Secure by default. Golden paths. Automated SBOMs. Centralized observability. We've been arguing for this stuff for half a decade! Now it's becoming law.

If your company does business in Europe, your platform team has been handed its greatest weapon for securing budget and attention this year.

Nigel Douglas at Cloudsmith (def one of the sharpest people working on supply chain security in the community right now) wrote an awesome piece, and a gave a companion webinar on everything you need to know on the CRA and how platform teams operationalize it. He breaks down a four-part framework for surviving the CRA’s requirements:

• Hardening the golden path: Bake the requirements into the IDP so every new service is compliant from git init. Hardened base image, pre-configured logging, mandatory auth, the works.

• Automating the SBOM and dependency chain: Every push generates an updated SBOM. The audit trail goes from a manual nightmare to a byproduct of the pipeline.

• Self-service compliance via templates. IaC modules that disable public access, enforce TLS 1.3, prohibit weak defaults by design. Gates that block containers with known-exploited CVEs.

• Incident response and telemetry: Observability that flags exploit patterns automatically, so the 24-hour reporting window stops being terrifying.

Read that list again. Every one of those is something a good platform team is already trying to build, or wishes they had cover to build. Now you have the cover.

Nigel calls this compliance becoming "a byproduct of the developer workflow, not a blocker to it." The orgs that figure it out before September 2026 are going to find themselves with faster audits, easier enterprise sales conversations, and the funding they need for their platform dreams. The orgs that don't? They'll be panic-buying tools and building security slop in crunch time at 2am.

What are you waiting for? Take a look at Read Nigel's full breakdown, and start using it’s arguments to pitch your boss.

Quick bites

• The sirens of IT Ops want to drown your platform crew

• Want to watch the recordings of PlatformCon workshops and talks you weren't able to attend? We're uploading more every day on the community YouTube channel.

Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly. Your weekly knead of platform engineering dough. Every week, we dive into another corner of the platform engineering universe, from industry insights and community news to practical lessons and live demos.

Plus… our friends at Tailscale are organising their own awesome conference - TailscaleUp! They’ll be in San Francisco on August 26, 2026 and are giving the community discounts. You can save $100 off TailscaleUp registration now though May 31st and use PE10 for an additional 10% off your ticket.

Where are you on the agentic ladder?

I've been heads-down for months with my AI & platform co-conspirators Kaspar, Mallory Haigh, and Ajay Chankramath on a piece of research I'm honestly buzzing to share.

The four levels of agentic software development in the enterprise is our attempt to give engineering leaders a real map of where they are, where they're going, and what the platform underneath them needs to look like to actually get there. Mamma mia, surprise surprise! The conversations we're having every single day all point to the same thing. It's not the models holding teams back. It’s not the tools (shocker). It's the platform.

As your AI capability matures, and expands, your platform needs to mature and expand with it. If your AI usage is outpacing your platform. You’re fu- in trouble. We’ve known this for a while now. Last year we published data showing that 95% of platform teams were failing with AI, and the 5% were using platforms. Exciting stuff at the time. But that exciting stuff at the time is old news now. Now we need to go deep on exactly what that means for the highest performing organizations today, and what can be done for you to replicate.

Here is the ladder of maturity that we’re talking about. Each rung is defined by how the human role evolves as agents take over more of the value stream:

• Level 1: Human in the loop. Agents suggest & humans still approve every line. Gains are real but linear. Review bandwidth is the cap.

• Level 2: Human on the loop. Agents become parallel participants. Humans dispatch the work, and validation becomes an industrial feedback loop rather than a single gate.

• Level 3: Humans as orchestrators. The platform runs as a background execution layer. Agents respond to system signals on their own. Review is exception-based.

• Level 4: Fully autonomous (outlook). The production system becomes partially self-adjusting. Agents initiate, implement, validate, and promote within guardrails you've defined.

It’s the rungs of this ladder that drive the incredible ROI that teams are seeing with AI. And it’s only possible to successfully climb this ladder if you’ve got the platform maturity to support it.

And here's the further punchline. None of these rungs are obtainable without what we're calling an Agentic Development Platform (ADP). Not that the Internal Developer Platform that won the human-developer era is disappearing, but it is evolving. Probabilistic systems (models, agents) need a deterministic fabric (policies, ephemeral envs, RBAC, observability) wrapped around them, or the whole thing falls over. That's why most failed AI initiatives we analyzed fell apart.

There is far too much in these 40 pages to summarise here. So read it, find your rung, and tell me what's pinning you there. If you read one whitepaper this month, make it this one.

Quick bites

Highlight of the week:

• How to prepare for the agents: Platform engineering executive roundtable

From the community:

• Want to watch the recordings of PlatformCon workshops and talks you weren't able to attend? We're uploading more every day on the community YouTube channel.

Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly. Your weekly slice of platform engineering pie. Every week, we dive into another corner of the platform engineering universe, from industry insights and community news to practical lessons and live demos.

Plus… 80% (so far) are seeing positive ROI from AI!? We’re at the beginning of our State of AI in Platform Engineering survey. Share where your ROI stands!

The panel topic at next week's IaCConf has been keeping me up at night. "Platform Engineering in the Age of AI Teammates. Building platforms when AI agents are the new consumers."

Let’s pause on that for a second. AI agents are the new consumers.

Almost every platform engineering decision we've made in the last decade has been for human developers. Just as we began the journey of massively expanding the platform persona to security, observability, and beyond, we need to expand 10x further as soon the majority of platform use will be from AI agents.

And yeah… it works. Until it doesn’t. We’ve got the speed. But we’ve also get the weird breakage you can’t actually explain. We’ve 10x’d the ability to move fast, and thus 10x the power to break things.

The Spacelift team is running IaCConf 2026 on May 14 with exactly this question at the center. 20+ IaC leaders across 13 sessions, including Corey Quinn ("AI Speaks Terraform Like a Tourist"), Matt Gowie ("From IaC to Agents"), Amin Astaneh ("10x Velocity, Operational Risk"), and yours truly on the AI Teammates panel.

The questions worth your morning:

• When does AI-generated IaC help vs hurt? 10x throughput is real (the gain is parallel agents, not faster individuals). But so is 10x blast radius.

• What replaces Terraform workflows at scale? When agents skip the plan/review step, what catches them?

• How do you deploy agents without losing control? Policy-as-code stops being a nice-to-have.

• What does platform engineering look like for non-human users? Spoiler: it isn't a portal;)

Here's the angle I'll be bringing. This is a platform race, not a model race. Platform engineering for AI agents isn't a UX problem. It's a contract problem. Human developers needed ergonomic interfaces, helpful errors, opinionated defaults. Agents need deterministic feedback loops, structured failures, and blast-radius controls baked into the platform itself. The IDP that won the human-dev era doesn't disappear. It evolves into an Agentic Developer Platform (ADP) for the coming autonomous-agent era. Same backbone, new contract.

And IaC is the canary. It's where the agent contact surface is most direct, where guardrails are most testable, and where the consequences are most immediate. Get the platform contract right, your throughput multiplies. Get it wrong, you're the disaster girl meme. 

Except it's 15,000 resources, not 150

Register now. Virtual, free, and if you're sitting on this question, May 14 is where we dive into some answers!

Quick bites

Highlight of the week:

• How to watch the watcher: Investigating vulnerability scanner reports 101

From the community:

• Want to watch the recordings of PlatformCon workshops and talks you weren't able to attend? We're uploading more every day on the community YouTube channel.

Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly. Your weekly hunt for the platform engineering easter egg Every week, we dive into best practices, news, lessons and updates from the platform engineering community.

3 things you need to read this easter

People can debate whether we are in a golden age of technology, but one thing is certain… the community is in a golden age of research. Thanks to survey data, events, and research interviews with the 270,000 of you - Weave Intelligence and the Platform Engineering Community has been able to publish some awesome research over the last few months.

Community ambassadors write some of the best blogs I’ve read, and every few weeks a new report on the incredible frontier of AI and platform engineering is published. Whether you’ve got a long weekend, or don’t - one thing is universal. You need to read this research.

The great unlock: How platform engineering creates AI-native enterprises. This report breaks down how platform engineering is the missing piece that helps businesses move from scattered AI pilots to real, company-wide AI systems. It covers everything from the architecture (in mega detail) and governance models needed, to a real-world example of how going "AI-native" improved customer experiences and drove new revenue for a hotel use case.

Vulnerability management for platform engineers. This report makes one of the best arguments i’ve read that instead of pushing security onto developers ("shift left🤮"), teams should bake it directly into the platform itself by shifting down, so that secure behavior just happens automatically through hardened images, policy guardrails, and automated fixes. It walks through a practical seven-step roadmap and the key capabilities needed to get there, ultimately making security a background feature rather than a constant drain on our productivity and our souls.

Operationalizing AI coding agents in regulated industries. This report makes the case that AI coding agents, while insanely powerful, introduce serious risks in regulated industries like finance and government that traditional governance approaches weren't designed to handle. It lays out a practical path for operationalizing AI agents safely, keeping humans involved where it matters while letting agents do more within tightly controlled guardrails. Basically? It’s the toolkit you need to actually operationalizing agents without blowing everything up.

Together these reports total almost 60 pages, and 10,000+ words of platform engineering and AI best practice putting together information at the cutting edge of the jagged frontier of AI (with much more soon to come).

The core theme across all? To succeed with AI, you need platform engineering. And the governance, standardisation, and automation that it brings.

Get reading! There is a lot more to come.

Quick bites

Highlight of the week:

• Platform Engineering workshop in NYC: Turning guardrails into deterministic infra fixes

From the community:

• Want to watch the recordings of PlatformCon workshops and talks you weren’t able to attend? We’re uploading more every day on the community Youtube channel!

Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly. Your weekly shot of platform engineering espresso. Every week, we dive into another corner of the platform engineering universe, from industry insights and community news to practical lessons and live demos.

Plus… contribute to the 2026 Observability Platform Engineering Market Guide and get exclusive early access to results!

That new tool isn’t going to solve your problem

It’s been an active couple months for our community roundtables, or platform engineering group therapy as I like to call them. With 2 last week in Vegas at Google Next. One thing stuck massively in my mind. We are obsessed with solving all problems with the same kind of solutions.

As engineers always do, the conversation so often focused on what tool or new stack teams needed to migrate to to remedy their problem… but that just ain’t it.

We are technical people. So we want to find technical solutions. I get it. But new tooling is very rarely the answer to your problem. And the numbers can be stark. 

• 85% of enterprises migrated tooling; only 25% saw the expected ROI.

• $1.75M average cost, 18% over budget, 37% delivered no value.

• 68% said productivity dropped; 70% saw developer burnout.

• 75% found security harder post-new tool.

These are taken from the DevOps Migration Index and shared in last week's community webinar by Sylvain Deyris where he broke down some of the report's data and how he’s been approaching this problem.

At the same time, the report shows that 92% of teams that integrated their existing stack got better outcomes than those who ripped and replaced.  So why do we keep dreaming of solving our problems with a shiny new tool?

Because not only do technical people yearn for technical solutions - folks also yearn for the easy way out. We want that one tool we can buy, that one creative script that will solve the problem. But that’s not how things work. And in the age of AI - it’s only going to get worse.

We need the socio - in the sociotechnical, the cultural and system changes, more than ever. When you look at a problem like no one knowing what’s in their AI-generated code, the solution isn't just the best new AI code review tool. It’s frank conversations on ownership.

Especially as we face the current AI whackamole, or using new AI tooling to solve problems created by the previous AI tooling. If you’re never improving the cultural foundation as you go, the core problems are never going to go away.

I want you to think about a problem you’re trying to solve and the solutions you’re toying with. Are all the solutions technical? Then you might need to do a bit more thinking.

Quick bites

Highlight of the week:

• Roundtable: Citizen developers in the enterprise on the rise: What platform teams need to know

From the community:

• Want to watch the recordings of PlatformCon workshops and talks you weren’t able to attend? We’re uploading more every day on the community YouTube channel!

Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly. Your weekly print of the platform engineering boarding pass. Every week, we dive into best practices, news, lessons, and updates from the platform engineering community.

P.S. Check out the new open source AI agent harness, AURA. It’s a production-grade runtime + orchestration layer that lets AI agents run as real systems (with workflows, tools, observability, etc.).

5 lessons from Nvidia, Kubecon & RSAC

We’ve had one of the most hectic few weeks in Platform Engineering Community history - 6 in-person events, 5 conferences, and 2 talks across 3 countries.

In Amsterdam, I got the chance to take the full temperature of EMEA at our roundtable, workshops, and Exec dinner in Amsterdam. While at the same time, we scouted out the world at Nvidia GTC in San Jose, Qcon in London, RSAC in San Francisco, and SREcon in Seattle. Here are my 5 crucial takeaways from this platform engineering world tour:

Identity management is the new perimeter: It couldn’t be better timed to share our latest course on Infrastructure Identity for Platform Engineering. It was clear, diving into the pandemonium of RSAC, the world’s largest cybersecurity conference, that with the explosion of machine-to-machine interactions (API keys, service accounts, AI agents, etc.), NHI management is on the path to top priority

Cognitive load is going up, not down: New survey day (plus anecdotally from dozens of convos over the last 2 weeks), 2/3 of engineers say they are more stressed than 5 years ago with the onset of AI. Overwhelmingly, as AI speeds up throughput through code gen, research, and prototyping, most of those I talked to are just ending up with more parallel work, more unfinished threads, and more decisions per hour - and nowhere near less work. 

Throughput is massively up, but nothing else is: New data confirms that throughput is up 59%+ on average, but only 5% are actually turning that into real delivery improvement. For others, despite higher throughput, they’re seeing more changes failing on main, worse MTTR, and, for the most part, are running faster and faster but staying in the same place.

The AI bubble isn’t going anywhere: Each of these 5 conferences focuses on different domains, but to no one's surprise, 95% of what every booth is talking about, every talk is exploring, every Meetup, meeting, and coffee chat is zoomed in on is, of course… AI. But not the way we used to. Even just 6 months ago, we still dealt overwhelmingly in abstracts and hypotheticals. Now I’ve seen dozens of separate demos of coding agents, watched AI SREs diagnose and remediate issues that would’ve taken hours to otherwise solve, and watched one of the more advanced examples, an agent control plane managing half a dozen agents rebuilding a legacy monolith while the rest of the team focuses on new apps. What made these systems actually work wasn’t just the models; it was the platform scaffolding underneath them - identity, boundaries, and validation. We are moving from the messy middle to build real, long-lasting, and high-powered agentic development. Stay tuned for a lot more from me on this topic.

Every layer of AI needs platform engineering: Whether you’re talking about AI-native infrastructure and GPU management with Nvidia, AI SRE best practices in SREcon, or managing a fleet of parallel coding agents at KubeCon… It’s the teams with platform engineering who are both pushing ahead into new frontiers and actually delivering on the promise of these core AI trends.

What were your takeaways? Reply and let me know.

Quick bites

Highlight of the week:

• AURA!! Go check it out.  If you're thinking about how AI actually runs in real environments, not just demos, this is a practical look at where the space is heading (and for some of us, we are already there).

From the community:

• Want to watch the recordings of PlatformCon workshops and talks you weren’t able to attend? We’re uploading more every day on the community Youtube channel!

Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly. Your weekly part of the platform engineering backcurtain. Every week, we dive into best practices, news, lessons, and updates from the platform engineering community. This is a guest newsletter by Lou Bichard who works at Ona and runs background-agents.com, a community and landscape for teams navigating the background agent ecosystem.

Plus… answer the State of AI in Platform Engineering survey!

Everyone is becoming a platform engineer

The software factory is here, now what? 

Before I tell you a story about software factories, I want to take you back to 2023. Specifically two weeks post GPT-4. But, why? Because software factories have been a long-running obsession of mine and I’d like to think the following prophecy came true. In fact it’s a good summary of the problems the entire industry is now wrestling with. Back then, people thought I was crazy. By the end of today’s newsletter, I’ll make another prophecy, but this time for the future of platform engineers, so stick with me. 

Ever since this day I’ve been imagining a world where I sit  ‘on the loop’ designing the feedback system while agents ship. In a way the mad fantasies of a platform engineer, designing the perfect system that self-heals, auto-conforms to standards. The perfect ‘platform’.

In January, I built it. 

Agents raised issues, PRs and reviewed their own code. To push the idea to the extreme, I chose the hardest product I could think of: a bank. And so ‘the bank that builds itself’ was born. A few days later the bank was off, raising its own PRs, and building itself. 

But, why do I bring this up? Because, a few months after, it seems the folks at OpenAI had been doing something very similar. They called it harness engineering. The idea was the same: don’t write a single line of code. Instead, design the system agents run on. If the agents go off course, blame the system, add scripts, tests, and try again. Then repeat ad infinitum. 

But, as a former platform engineer, one particular line stood out to me: “This is the kind of architecture you usually postpone until you have hundreds of engineers. With coding agents, it's an early prerequisite: the constraints are what allows speed without decay or architectural drift.”

From my own experiments and reading what OpenAI had done it’s clear to me where the puck is heading: every engineer is now a platform engineer. 

Let me explain. For years, when asked about when a company should invest in platform engineering, I’ve recommended Hazel Weakly's fantastic post so you want to hire for developer tooling. In the article, she maps engineering headcount to infrastructure maturity: 

• Documentation becomes necessary at 15 engineers

• A dedicated infra specialist makes sense at 50

• A nascent internal platform at 150

• Fully independent specialist teams at 500

• Embedded expertise across the entire org at 1500.

With agents? This math no longer works. Not only do agents allow individuals to ship at the speed of multiples, but agents follow standards far more obediently than a department of engineers ever did. And whilst at this point someone is bound to say “Yeah, right. But have you ever used an LLM? They frequently ignore what you ask of them”.

And to that I would agree, agents commonly skip steps as they’re eager to please. But the whole premise of harness engineering is wrapping these non-deterministic agents with backpressure and scripts to ensure agent conforms, that’s the point. Agent wrangling. 

So where does this leave us? I believe history is about to repeat itself. We’re about to go back 10 or 15 years to when platform engineering (in its modern form) started to take shape. All of the ideas we’ve crafted about golden paths, infra as code, platform as a product are all about to be re-invented from first principles by engineers who weren’t along for the ride the first time. 

So here’s my prophecy: for many organisations: things will get worse, before they get better. Organisations will have engineers re-build internal tools because they can, proliferate standards because their agents had no idea a standard exists, and sprawl will multiply. Just as they felt the pain 10 years ago and turned to platform engineering, the same will happen now. Except we’ll see organizations far smaller than ever before re-learning the lessons of platform engineering.

All this considered, what’s the antidote? It’s empathy, as it always was. The best insights for platform teams I have always said, have come from ‘sitting with your developers’ and walking a mile in their shoes, feeling their pain and solving for it. Now, we need to ‘sit’ with our agents. The only way to truly understand how to manage, and govern a software factory is to build one yourself. Because whether your company is actively building a software factory or not, that’s where this is all heading. Take a project and run your own harness engineering experiment. Fight the urge to write a single line of code. Focus on standards, scripts and backpressure. In many ways, it’s exactly the same, but in so many more ways, it’s entirely different. 

These past two weeks, my colleague Zach has been re-building a software factory in public for an app called memo. Every line has been written by agents. Working in the background, continually. Zach is the platform engineer, building the harness. We live-streamed every day for the last 2 weeks and published it all on: software-factory.dev. But if streaming is not your thing, I also wrote background-agents.com, which has info from companies like Stripe, Ramp and others building with agents in the background, orchestrated by events and triggers. We’re now even running a summit to tell these stories. And you should join us. 

Quick bites

Highlight of the week:

• The journey to production AI: A practical guide for platform engineers and SREs

From the community:

• Want to watch the recordings of PlatformCon workshops and talks you weren’t able to attend? We’re uploading more every day on the community YouTube channel!

Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly. Your weekly look in the platform engineering mirror. Every week, we dive into best practices, news, lessons, and updates from the platform engineering community.

Plus… House of Kube hits Google Next for the first time ever! Don’t miss it

Infrastructure Identity for Platform Engineers

The weather has been perfect in Barcelona for the last week. Perfect for sitting in my room, taking our latest course on Platform Engineering University - Infrastructure Identity for Platform Engineers.

The value prop is pretty simple. If you care about security, the experience of everyone and everything interacting with your infra, humans, services, or just not having your environment blow up… this is a must.

So what is Infrastructure Identity? It's basically the practice of assigning cryptographically verified identities to every entity (Devs, AI, angry interns, services, and all kinds of our other machine friends) in your environment and using those identities to control access, rather than relying on passwords, static API keys, or VPN-based perimeters.

In the last 10 years, we’ve massively scaled our infrastructure. And AI makes this even harder. Autoscaling clusters, microservices, CI/CD pipelines, AI workloads, and more. While at the same time, our access controls are stuck in the 1990s… It’s insane. Shared SSH keys, tokens that live forever, manual provisioning, etc., etc. The kind of setup where a three-year-old API key is silently sitting in your environment, basically itching for the day it gets the chance to fulfil it’s dream and blow everything up.

In the agentic era, it's not an outlandish argument that every static secret is a live vulnerability. And platform engineers, not just security teams, are the ones who need to fix it by treating identity as a platform-level capability alongside policy and state, shifting security load down into the platform, and making secure-by-design the path of least resistance.

Our machine identities are getting smarter, faster, more capable, but most of all, there are just plain MORE of them. 100x more, and that number will keep growing. Agents multiply whatever already exists. If your baseline is shared keys and static secrets, you don't get agent-powered productivity, you get 100x exposure to the same failure modes. You cannot enable a future like that on top of access control that's locked in the past.

Four modules. All bangers. Go check it out and tell me what you think.

Quick bites

Highlight of the week:

• At Google Next? We’re doing two awesome roundtables! Don’t miss them👇

  • Platform engineering roundtable: How AI is breaking software delivery

  • AI security by design: Platform Engineering roundtable @ Google Cloud Next

From the community:

• Want to watch the recordings of PlatformCon workshops and talks you weren’t able to attend? We’re uploading more every day on the community YouTube channel!

My advice for surviving layoffs.

Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly. Your weekly poach of the platform engineering egg. Every week, we dive into best practices, news, lessons and updates from the platform engineering community.

Plus… don’t miss House of Kube at Google Next for the first time ever

My advice for surviving layoffs.

This is a more serious and intense Platform Weekly than I have written in a long time. Yesterday, I had dinner with a friend who shared that they had been laid off. The day before, I'd had lunch with two former colleagues, both had been laid off. On Monday, I had a beer with another friend whose entire department had also been laid off.

At the same time, I receive emails, Slack and LinkedIn messages every single day from people across our industry looking for jobs, or fearing for their own.

I am not a life coach, or a therapist, so I will speak only about our universe and what I’ve learned from our 270k-strong community and the dozens of workshops, roundtables, and 100s of leaders that I’ve talked to in the last 6 months.

The fundamental point is simple (relatively). You need to be AI-first.

As an organization, as a team, a department, but most of all as an individual.

You might hate AI, you might resent AI, you might think it’s slop or a fad, or disagree fundamentally whether it’s the future or not, but at the end of the day - to your boss, and their boss, and so on up the chain - it is the most important thing in the world.

What are three things you can do to massively improve your position?

Know your story: Platform engineering is a foundational stone of successful AI. The organizations that win this aren't the ones with the best model; they're the ones with the best platform. Models are becoming a commodity. The platform that harnesses them is the differentiator. I live that. I breathe that. I’ve got the data to back it. That is my story. Why might my platform engineering team need to be kept? Because you need us if you want your AI initiatives to succeed. Why should I stay on board? Because you need me to build the Agentic Developer Platform that determines whether your boss's boss’s AI goals succeed. 

Play the game: Sure, your boss probably has no idea what they're talking about. You probably can't build an agent over the weekend to migrate all your crap off Cobol as they proposed. Or rewrite that legacy monolith into Rust - as background execution at that scale requires platform infrastructure your teams don't have yet. But your response to these “visionary” ideas can’t just be to scoff and retreat back to tweaking some Terraform modules. The game right now is crazy, ambitious, and often very successful, and sometimes not, experimentation with AI.

Should you spin up an agent to rewrite that monolith into Rust? Probably not. But you can “No, but…” your boss on the path of other AI experimentation. You tell your boss, “That idea we shouldn’t do, but we can try and use AI to map dependencies, generate test coverage, and identify which parts of the monolith are realistic candidates for extraction or rewrite. We can then build agents to validate those changes (and iterate), catch regressions, and enforce some quality, and we can do it in a way that proves out the platform architecture we need to do this safely at scale." There are a lot of times we need to say, “no”. But you also need to say “No, but…” and show you are playing the same game. The "Probably not" becomes a platform-maturity argument rather than a practicality one, and the counter-proposal now explicitly connects the experimentation to building the platform architecture… so you're not just redirecting your boss's idea, you're using it to tell your story.

Upskill, upskill, upskill: You need to be learning how to operate in this new world. That means understanding how AI changes platform engineering, the fundamentals of evolving to Agentic Developer Platforms, and the core tenets of building and utilizing agents across the SDLC. You need to be AI-native. There are currently three AI-focused courses on the Platform Engineering University, with many more on the way, focused on exactly this. Intro to AI in Platform Engineering, which will give you the story, AI in Platform Engineering, which will help you play the game, and Agentic AI in Platform Engineering, which will ensure you have the skills to operate at the very top of this new frontier. You will be able to tell your boss, “No, that idea is stupid. But I have a great one you’ll love,” and then actually do it.

At the end of the day, layoffs can be completely random. There are no 3 tricks that guarantee you’ll keep a job. 

But if you fully understand and are focused on these 3 things, there is a very good chance you will do more than just survive in this new frontier; you’ll thrive.

Quick bites

Highlight of the week:

• Meet Unify: Governed AI that knows your delivery. Check out our new community format, Platform Engineering Demo, where Community members and partners show off their tools. 

From the community:

• Want to watch the recordings of PlatformCon workshops and talks you weren’t able to attend? We’re uploading more every day on the community YouTube channel!

Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly. Your weekly shot of platform engineering tequila. Every week, we dive into best practices, news, lessons and updates from the platform engineering community.

P.S.

• In San Francisco? Come join our meetup next week on how to survive and keep up in an AI first world

• We’ve launched an Instagram for House of Kube! We’ll be posting all the awesome pictures, videos and behind the scenes GOLD there.

It’s party time.

Next week the team and I will be at KubeCon for a workshop, a roundtable, an exec dinner, a Meetup and of course… the one event that stands above all others in my heart, HOUSE OF KUBE!

I remember attending KubeCon Valencia and going from corporate event to corporate event looking for a fun way to not just network or learn, but to actually hang out with folks and have some fun.

I couldn’t find a single event in 2022 that was really about letting loose. So we created one.

House of Kube has been the (in)famous and (un)official opening party of KubeCon ever since. Literally thousands of us have come together to dance, sing karaoke, drink and have a great time (And have some pretty intense engineering debates and networking over beers too). This is the event that combines all of it.

There is a reason it's taken over Vegas for Re:Invent and soon Next as well.

On the Community events page, there is of course opportunity for awesome roundtable discussions, Meetups and deep workshops where you can better learn about and discuss platform engineering… but there is no event in cloud-native like House of Kube.

If you’ve never been - House of Kube Amsterdam is a perfect place to start. And if you have, I can’t wait to see you again;)

Let’s rock this!

Quick bites

Highlight of the week:

• NVIDIA has introduced NeMoClaw at GTC, and our friends at Vultr are one of the integrated partners. So they’re offering folks in the community a 7-day trial to play around: https://discover.vultr.com/nemoclaw-offer

From the community:

• Want to watch the recordings of PlatformCon workshops and talks you weren’t able to attend? We’re uploading more every day on the community Youtube channel!

Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly. Your weekly flight across the platform engineering globe. Every week, we dive into best practices, news, lessons and updates from the platform engineering community.

But first…

• Check out our new AI course! It’s an absolute banger. Here is a discount code you can use: pw-350-off

• On Tuesday next week, we’re going to have an awesome conversation with Kelsey Hightower on pragmatic platform engineering for 2026. You can register here!

• And a great new article on the intersection between platform engineering & vulnerability management. Check it out.

PlatformCon is going worldwide

I am extremely excited to announce that PlatformCon is launching Live Days in 2026 in both Sydney, and Sao Paulo!

In 2022, Platform first started in the depths of the pandemic with a fully virtual way for 7,000 of us to come together online and discuss this new frontier of platform engineering. Things were murky and vague then. We were still defining (arguing about) terminology, and best practices were entirely theoretical.

In 2024, we did our first in-person day with 330 people in London to get a real sense of what it means to talk platform engineering in person. There was an energy there that felt like this sweet release of tension at finally getting to talk in-person about this discipline we’re all so focused on.

In 2025, we went bigger. 700 people in London, 500 in Paris, and 450 in New York - not to mention just over 40,000 people joining the virtual content across talks, panels and workshops. It was honestly one of the best weeks of my life. It felt truly like the culmination of years of work and industry growth. No longer were panels about “What is platform engineering?”, they were about “How do we do ‘great’ platform engineering?”

2026 is going to be another step change. I’m talking about thousands of platform engineers coming together across:

• Live Day London on June 23rd

• Live Day New York on June 25th

• Live Day Paris on September 24th

• Live Day Sydney on… well that we still need to reveal!

• Live Day Sao Paulo on November 7th

• Live Day… where next? You let us know;)

Platform engineering is at an inflection point in the software universe. More and more data from our own surveys, to DORA, to Google Cloud reveal that platform engineering is the fundamental layer to successful AI. And at the same time, platform engineering has grown to absorb more and more domains, and we discover that the core principles of the discipline drive incredible value in the realms of security, observability, FinOps, data and more.

That means there is a greater need than ever for us to come together, debate best practice, learn from each other and take that learning out to the world.

And I'm so grateful to be on this journey with you. Stay tuned for more deets, CfPs, ticket information and everything else. Let’s goooo!!

Event highlight:

• Infra governance for rule breakers: How to make guardrails invisible

From the community:

• Want to watch the recordings of PlatformCon workshops and talks you weren’t able to attend? We’re uploading more every day on the community Youtube channel!

Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly. Your weekly scuba through the platform engineering reef. Every week, we dive into best practices, news, lessons and updates from the platform engineering community.

But first… this Platform Weekly is partnering with Jellyfish, the Intelligence Platform for AI-Integrated Engineering:

Platform teams are now the architects of AI transformation. That means getting adoption right, enabling developers, and proving it's working.

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• Explore their AI Engineering Trends report and benchmark your org against real-world data.

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• Need to show leadership it's working? Request an AI Impact demo from them.

3 reasons AI needs platform engineering

If you’ve read anything from me or the wider community in the last 6 months you’ve probably heard “Platform engineering is fundamental to the success of AI” best exemplified by the famous Google Cloud stat where “86% of leaders believe that platform engineering is essential to realizing the full business value of AI”. 

This idea has been on my mind for awhile now, but spread like wildfire across the industry with the publishing of the State of AI in Platform Engineering Vol.1 and the 2026 DORA report.

What exactly does it mean when we say that? Let me break down 3 key reasons for it.

Platform engineering is the key (accidentally)

You don’t need me to tell you the benefits of AI. The ability to enable engineers to massively supercharge the creation of software, or to autonomously create software itself. It’s only possible to do this however if your security, your governance, your CI/CD, your testing, and all the other aspects of your software engineering organization are actually able to keep up with it.

It can only work if your team is locked in on making sure productivity is being properly measured, and if DevEx experience is actually being taken care of.

And guess what? These are all key elements of platform engineering.

There are 12 table stakes that define all successful platform engineering initiatives. If you talk to a mature platform team - there is a 99.99% chance that they cover these 12 points.

These are things like platform as a product, infra automation, testing, API management, observability, cost management etc. ALL platforms should have these.

And so it’s no surprise that orgs with platforms are the ones who are able to deliver the incredible value that AI promises - as AI needs all of these things to succeed.

From multicloud to… multiAI (infra)

AI systems depend on extremely complex, rapidly evolving infrastructure stacks including models, data pipelines, GPU compute, storage, and cloud environments. 

In the same principle as how your platform might enable multi-cloud, platform teams can build their AI infra as modular, building blocks covering compute, storage, networking, GPUs, and AI services. Devs are exposed through an abstraction layer in the IDP where they teams swap or integrate components without redesigning the entire stack. Your platform could enable teams to:

• Switch AI providers or models as capabilities or needs change

• Use different GPU resources or orchestrators depending on cost or performance

• Integrate new data sources or vector databases without rebuilding pipelines

• Run workloads across hybrid and multi-cloud environments

You can see immediately how this could drive an orgs capability. What if a new model from Anthropic is 10x better, cheaper or faster than an OpenAI or Google one? Just swap it. Does a new set of GPU resources cost 10% less? Then swap it. This kind of immediate hands-on freedom is a massive massive unlock.

Everyone becomes a developer

At a round table 10 months ago, a Head of Platform at a major US retailer told me “We are on the path to any office worker in the company spinning up their own specialized micro-apps through the platform”. The words of the conversation sounded basically sci fi, but as we talked through the platform engineering principles that would enable it - I knew exactly how it could be done. And how platform engineering was perfect for it.

Now… almost every second conversation I’m having is sharing that this is the path they’re on.

We have entered the age of the Enterprise Citizen Developer, where non-developer colleagues can use AI to vibe code their own specialised microapplications. One conversation 2 weeks ago, “Our CEO himself has coded out 17 micro-apps through the platform. Stuff he has always wanted to use for his own work, but didn’t think it was worth dev time”. That story is everywhere.

How does platform engineering enable this? We’ll go back to point 1 in this newsletter.

What does this idea need? It needs governance, security, policy, cost management, testing, change validation etc etc etc

These are all things that platform engineering provides.

So what does this mean for you? Well, if you’re a platform engineer… you’re a lot more important than you think. And if you're trying to get funding, or interest in your platform initiative, your boss might not be seeing the full picture.

So, make sure to send this to them;)

Quick bites

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From the community:

• Want to watch the recordings of PlatformCon workshops and talks you weren’t able to attend? We’re uploading more every day on the community Youtube channel!