What 143 platform teams told us about keeping infrastructure alive
When we started doing platform work more than ten years ago, nobody called it "platform engineering." We were just trying to make it easier for people …
The post-VMware playbook: what to move first, what to leave for last
We've had four separate conversations this quarter with teams mid-evaluation on leaving VMware. Different industries, different scale, same underlying …
Hiring, tools, overload, automation: one cost wearing four names
Ask a platform team to describe what's getting in the way of their work, and you'll usually hear about four things: hiring the right people, too many …
Diagnosing the integration tax: three costs, three fixes
The platform engineering integration tax is the cumulative cost of building and running a production platform from the open source ecosystem, not the …
Pushing container images to China: what we learned the hard way
If you're running infrastructure in China, you've probably noticed that container image pushes behave strangely. Builds that complete in minutes elsew …
The CNCF landscape has 230+ tools. Choosing from it is where platform teams get stuck.
The CNCF just celebrated its 10th anniversary. What started with Kubernetes and around twenty member organizations has grown into an ecosystem of over …
Introducing the Giant Swarm Agent Platform: Agents that run where your data lives
Your engineers are already running AI agents. Not as an approved rollout, but as something that crept in over the past year, wired into whatever tools …
The platform assembly tax: a framework for what platform teams keep describing
Ask a platform team to describe what's getting in the way of their work, and you'll usually hear about four things: hiring the right people, too many …
Kubernetes Secrets and ConfigMaps in 2026: the Secret is the last mile
Part IV of the Understanding Basic Kubernetes Concepts series, updated from the 2016 original.
