Last night, we had our second ever in-person platform engineering roundtable in Germany. If you’ve never been to one of our roundtables. You need to.

It’s a small collection of platform engineering nerds (like me) sitting around and discussing their experience and thoughts on platform engineering.

Sometimes it’s a few leaders sharing war stories in a tiny, cramped room. Sometimes like last night (thanks to codecentric AG who helped us organise it), it's an awesome venue, with great food, and dozens of experts of every walk of life - 20 year veterans, first time platform engineers, consultancy CEOs, and more debating every intricacy of platform engineering for hours.

So, what did 40 platform engineering leaders have to say in Munich last night?

1. AI platform engineering is coming here. From code, and infra generation to AI-enabled infra orchestration. It’s clear AI is going to be a huge part of PE. But it’s also clear - that a lot of it just ain’t enterprise ready yet *cough TF file generation *cough.
2. Manuel Zapf's recent article on DAPR and the shift from cloud-native to platform-native is the talk of the town (Well, one room of the town). DAPR is another great example of tooling that embodies everything that is great about platform engineering.
3. Platform engineering is HOT in Germany. It’s been a long time since Europe was particularly famous for being pioneering in technology. But the conversations I’ve been having with German platform engineers are extremely cool. The energy is there. And it’s the same across all of Europe, we just had an awesome Meetup in Poland, and later this year is PlatformCon Paris.

2025 is clearly the year of in-person in the Platform Engineering community.

Yesterday was just the first of many.

Let’s do this.