Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly. Your weekly skip off the platform engineering stone. Every week, we dive into what’s hot in the platform engineering universe from best practices, lessons, to community news.

What’s hot?

• 25% say (so far) their orgs have no strategy for AI. Answer the State of AI platform engineering and share your answers.
• The next Platform Engineering Practitioner Certification course is filling up!
• We’ve got some awesome community events coming up in the next few weeks.

Platform engineering is eating the world

You might’ve noticed me use this phrase “platform engineering eats the world” more and more in my talks, articles, and in this newsletter over the last few months. If you’ve taken one of our certification courses, you’ve definitely heard me say it nonstop.

Though the phrasing is inspired by Kaspar von Grünberg’s article on the community blog from a few months ago (and ofc from Marc Andreessen’s legendary article), the message comes from what I am seeing all around me while talking to you, helping orgs with their platforms, and chatting with platform engineering ambassadors.

The power (and challenge) of platform engineering is the way it can touch everything. It can simultaneously improve developer productivity through better standardization and dev self-service, and it can improve security or better enable AI and 100 other use cases.

That makes setting the scope of your platform extremely hard, but also means the potential benefits and ROI are insane.

It is also no surprise that platform initiatives at orgs are slowly absorbing more and more departments around them.

Whether it is platform engineer leads seeing how easy it is to integrate security directly into the platform (the very first “Security Platform Engineers” are already working though that isn’t their official title yet) or the huge changes to DevEx, Infrastructure, and even data.

Platforms are also absorbing AI initiatives. As it becomes more and more clear how much impact platforms can have on furthering and driving AI through the enterprise (not to mention how powerful AI can be for improving the platform).

We are in the early stages still. But in our cloud native world - platform engineering is definitely starting to eat.