Platform engineers these days seem to be building everything. We’re shifting security and observability down into the platform. We’re building data platforms, and AI platforms, but the seemingly forgotten “frontier” across all of this is the basic idea of… testing. 

This is a huge topic for us at the moment. Just this week we had an epic one-two punch webinar and blog this week from Ole from TestKube (I also saw an awesome demo focused fully on how platform engineering and Kubernetes-native testing.

And over the last month, we’ve been surveying the readers of Platform Weekly on the state of their testing. When sharing the survey out, I received nine! Yes, nine emails saying “Finally, someone is talking about testing.” And I am not surprised, the results of the survey were dire…

Zero of the teams talked to had embedded testing directly into their platform.

• 63% of respondents said scaling test automation is a challenge they need to solve this year
• 53.7% described it as a significant challenge or even a major blocker
• 67% still orchestrate their tests entirely inside CI/CD pipelines (even though those pipelines weren’t built for the scale and testing demands)
• Half of all teams say “high maintenance overhead” and “slow execution times” are their top pain points

Is it hopeless? Definitely not. As the industry matures, there is so much more focus on these underappreciated (but incredible high value topics). And there is a lot more coming. Platform engineering is growing beyond the basics,, new experts like Ole are sharing their knowledge, and so we can get way deeper on the crucial, but maybe less sexy stuff.