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.
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 …
