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.
Nine years of predicting cloud native, scored honestly
I started writing annual predictions in 2017 to find out whether I could read the industry. Nine years in, that's turned out to be one of the least in …
Configuration management at Giant Swarm: a historical overview
This is the first of three posts on configuration management at Giant Swarm.
From three clusters to eighty: how scale shapes platform engineering
"Platform engineering" is one of the more elastic terms in the industry. A team running three clusters and a team running eighty both use it to descri …
The three costs inside the assembly tax
The platform engineering assembly tax is the cumulative cost of building and running a production platform from the open source ecosystem, not the too …
6 lessons learned from 6 years of building relationships with events
I've been managing relationships and organizing events at Giant Swarm for six years now. The two are more connected than the job title might suggest. …
Overwhelmed by scale: how product thinking fixes platform teams
Most platform engineering stories start with success. A small team builds something useful, leadership notices, and suddenly that team is everyone's p …
The cloud native era killed VMware's lock-in. Here's what to run instead.
If you're evaluating alternatives to VMware, you'll find no shortage of content telling you which hypervisor to pick or how the licensing compares. Wh …
