Platform Engineering

Here is how a lot of infrastructure still gets built in 2026. Someone opens a cloud console, clicks through a wizard, picks some defaults, and a resource appears. It works. The dashboard turns green. Everyone moves on. I can’t work that way. When I click a button and infrastructure appears, I feel like I borrowed it. I want to see what’s happening, I want the configuration written down where I can read it back, and I want to know why something exists instead of just that it exists. The console gives me a green checkmark. It doesn’t give me understanding. ...

Every platform team eventually asks the same question: should we build an Internal Developer Platform? The honest answer is usually yes. The part that wrecks teams is the how. I’ve watched platforms that cost a small fortune get shipped and then quietly abandoned because nobody wanted to use them. I’ve also seen a couple of Helm charts and a Kyverno policy change how a whole team ships software. The gap between those two outcomes has almost nothing to do with budget or which fashionable tool you picked. It comes down to whether you started by solving a real problem or by building the platform you imagined developers should want. ...

I write a lot about Kubernetes. I run it daily. I genuinely like it. So it might surprise you that I spend a fair amount of time talking people out of it. Here is the reality I keep walking into. A small team, a single product, a roadmap full of real features to build, and someone has decided the first milestone is a Kubernetes cluster. Three nodes minimum, etcd, a CNI, an ingress controller, cert-manager, a monitoring stack. Weeks of work before a single customer sees anything. Everyone nods along, because this is just how serious infrastructure looks in 2026. ...

For a long time, the cloud was just the water I swam in. I provisioned managed Kubernetes, clicked through the console, pasted a Terraform module someone else wrote, and shipped. It worked. Billing landed every month, the dashboards stayed green, and I never once asked what was actually running underneath. I trusted it the way you trust a lift in a building. You press the button and the doors open. ...