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 …
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 …
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 …
