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.
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 …
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 …
You're probably still paying for a VMware licence you no longer need
For years, VMware was the obvious answer. You needed to run workloads, you needed isolation, you needed enterprise support, and VMware delivered all o …
The platform assembly tax: what platform teams keep telling us
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 …
