Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly, your weekly surf on the platform engineering tsunami. This week we’re rounding off an incredible last week, at PlatformCon 2024

3 biggest trends from PlatformCon 2024

It’s now been exactly 7 days since my closing panel at PlatformCon 2024, and I’ve had a little time to think. PlatformCon was officially enormous. From the launch of the first-ever official platform engineering course, to the live day in London - we had over 35k people flow through 80 hours of PlatformCon content.

80 hours is a lot to absorb, but lucky for me - I got a front-row seat. These are the 3 biggest trends at PlatformCon 2024 this year:

1. Reference architectures are EVERYWHERE - when the reference architectures I helped put together first launched last year, we hoped they’d have an impact on the community. We’d never guess how huge it would be. Over 60k downloads in the last year, and more than 20+ talks featuring them!

2. Portals are nowhere to be found - Last year, almost 30% of all talks submitted to PlatformCon 2023 were about Portals, or discussed portals. This year? To my count… there are just 3. And two of those are about how Portals aren’t enough for platform engineering.
3. Standards, Standards, Standards - I am blown away by how much more standardized we have become in just the last year. PlatformCon 2023 was defined I think by the battle of ideas of how platform engineering should be. This year couldn’t be more different. From a shared understanding of reference architectures with a platform orchestrator in the middle to the best ways to get started and grow your platform from Minimum Viable Platforms, and the Platform Maturity Model.

If you haven’t watched any content from PlatformCon yet. What are you waiting for? Kelsey Hightower and my friend Kaspar von Grünberg discussing Platform Engineering in their fireside chat (and duking it out with chat in the live Q&A) is one of the best things I’ve watched all year.

Check it out now!

Quick bites

Event of the week:

• Zero to Minimum Viable Platform (MVP) in four phases

From the community:

• The Platform Engineering Slack is getting crazy with PlatformCon fever. Come join!