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 …
Why we stopped gatekeeping our personal development budget
This year I'm spending my personal development budget on Thai lessons, therapy, and a scooter safety course. I'm not sure all three of those would hav …
The best AI agent is the one that disappears
Here's something most AI vendors won't tell you: the goal shouldn't be to run more AI. It should be to run less — eventually. I know that sounds stran …
