Dear Platform Engineering,
I remember the afternoon five years ago when we were sitting in a small office in Berlin. It was raining. We had a little room we called the “Therapy Room” because of a little couch that we somehow all associated with therapists. Anyhow, Chris Stephenson was sitting on that very couch and we brainstormed how to call “the thing” that people were building. And that’s when we came up with the term “Internal Developer Platform” (which has since been sufficiently abused). Or I remember how Florian Lipp and I discussed what we should call those people that are building IDPs and started focusing on “platform engineers”.
So much has happened since then! The number of active platform engineers is growing like crazy. Second year on the Gartner Hypecycle! Over 20,000 active enterprises in the platform engineering community. Tens of millions of impressions on the reference architectures. The Youtube Channel alone now has over 380 educational videos. We executed 56 (!) Webinars like clockwork. 16,000 people at PlatformCon23 and today we are launching PC24 with more live-happenings around the world, more investments from our end than ever before and already an incredible line-up and speakers. Register today.
I just looked at my personal count. Although I wasn’t able to have that many direct customer contacts in comparison to previous years (the uncomfortable truth of being a CEO) I had the immense pleasure to look at over 150 setups. Here’s are my key observations:
- We’re beyond the “we’re looking” and we’re in the “we have a mandate and we are building”.
- People are way more educated. Gone is the day where people just think about User Interfaces when they think about platform engineering.
- Platform Orchestration has started to go mainstream. From Thoughtworks to Microsoft, the concept is established.
- Workload Specifications and abstraction layers are essential building blocks.
I hate predictions for next year - but here’s what we will focus on in 2024:
- Open Source reference architectures have now greatly reduced the time to first platform from months to weeks. But we will double down on this to make it even easier to get started.
- Open all our enablement materials, check-lists down to the Jira boards for public use so everybody can learn how other teams have been successful with platforming before them.
- Introduce smart defaults across any cloud. Whatever you want, there should be a readily available default configuration that you can then take to customize. Select your workload spec, express you want a db of type mongodb and send it through your pipeline. Configured or not, the system knows in most cases what to do. Super powerful.
I cannot wait to get started with 2024. But before we do I want to take a second and thank first and foremost the incredible team that makes all of this possible. Only a handful of people are running the entire engine that is the key source of inspiration for tens and thousands of you: Mariya, Luca, Sam, Carrie, Eskil, Adi, Florian, Guilia and all of those who worked on this as well this year. In the name of the community and from the bottom of my heart: thank you for all the hard work, the late nights, the attention to detail, the fairness and the restless will to make the world a better place through platform engineering. You truly are the real heroes here.
Our mission statement is to “serve platform engineers” and that of course wouldn’t be possible without you, the platform engineers”. To you, dear platform engineers, thank you for being here, to learning, pushing, trying, failing, getting up again and continuing.
My little son Balthasar who’s sitting next to me asked me to make sure I extend his regards. So from both of us here in the tiny village of Garz: happy holidays, wherever you are in the world. I hope that for just two weeks you can all rest a little before we’re all getting ready for the next uphill battle called 2024.
Kaspar
