Your platform was built for a different era
PLUS: I wrote a book and it’s a banger!
Hey there! Welcome to Platform Weekly. Your weekly quake of the platform engineering earth. Every week, we watch the pressure building across the community and bring you the forecast.
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
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